SLSL Intro "Almost But Not Quite Me ..."

[William Zantzinger]

--- Steve Maas <tyronemullet at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe Farina saw his contemporary of whom Heff is an
> avatar of sorts as  identifying himself with the
oppressed, and so made this imaginary affinity 
> actual?  (This is of course pure speculation.)

Kool, speculation is fun and even if we are way off
when we speculate we can still come up with
interesting readings. 


I'm not inclined to read characters as real people or
historical figures (even ones like George Washington,
Ben Franklin,  in M&D for example). I tend not to read
narrators, even weak "almost but not quite me"
narrators as autobiographical or as mouthpieces for
the author or whatever. So many of the authors Pynchon
mentions in the SL Introduction preface their fictions
in some way to dissuade the reader from reading the
characters as "real people." 

Heff, it seems, is invested with Pooh Perplex, beaver
teeth, mothering, tragedy....




The Pooh Perplex (1963), Crews: 

"Winnie-the-Pooh is, as  practically everyone knows,
one of the greatest books ever written, but it is also
one of the most controversial. Nobody can quite agree
as to what it really means." Using the critical
approaches to texts current in 1963, Crews created
fictitious critics who dazzle their readers with the
brilliance of their readings and the ingenuity of
their interpretations. Included are various approaches
to literary criticism: psychoanalytic, biographical,
materialist, stylistic, cultural, archetypal. The Pooh
Perplex seems to have inflicted no permanent damage on
Winnie-the-Pooh (nor was that Crews's intent), but
Crews did manage to stimulate a whole generation of
college students to reread it, or read it for the
first time. 



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