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

[Dave Monroe]

--- Mutualcode at aol.com wrote:
> ""...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 


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