SLSL Intro, "...shared levels of the life we all really live..."

[Mutualcode at aol.com]

""...I imposed on what I felt to be blank space a set of more
complicated topographies." (SL, Intro, p.20)

Brings to mind the notion of a palimpsest... something beneath
the setting of the imposed work, perhaps still alive, in the place
names and descriptions, just discernible through the imposition-
a sense of layering, or depth begins to ensue- for those with the
eye. It's not too hard to imagine the evolution of this technique
from the "junkshop or randomly assembled" type to the more
deliberately constructed layerings of the later works, where
what's going on, on the surface, is oblivious to the subterranean
meanings shared by the author and the reader, or perhaps, only
in the mind of a reader so disposed- plausible deniability for the
author, of course.

cf.

    ...excepting a sinister and wonderful Card Table which
    exhibits the cheaper Wave-like Grain known in the Trade
    as Wand'ring Heart, causing an Illusion of Depth into which 
    for years children have gaz'd as into the illustrated Pages
    of Books... [M&D, 1.17].

"Today we expect a complexity of plot and depth of character
which is missing from my effort here." (SL, Intro, p.19)

There is in that sentence, I think, a sense of self-parody. The
Intro Narrator, layering his pov onto the earlier self who wrote
the stories- opalescing into the jointly owned and operated- "my
effort here." "Here," given the deliberate shiftiness of the
narrator-set up on the very first page of the Intro- could easily
be taken to mean both the stories, and, tongue in cheek, the
Intro. Surely Pynchon is aware of this and expects us to be, 
as well.

respectfully