McHoul & Wills' chapter Re: SLSL Intro "Almost But Not Quite Me ..."

[jbor]

on 28/11/02 6:26 AM, MalignD at aol.com at MalignD at aol.com wrote:

> I didn't 
> read Rob's post as an attack on Dave Monroe personally.  There has
> been annoyance in the past over the cutting and pasting of copious amounts of
> material from elsewhere on the internet onto the P-list; no opinion offered,
> no comment, just regurgitation.  Granted that was not done by someone in the
> role of reading moderator.

Thanks. It wasn't intended as an attack at all. The (apparently) offending
paragraph of mine was this one:

> Yes, I agree, and I have to add that I was quite surprised to see it posted
> (ad nauseam) without either qualification or acknowledgement that it is so
> irrelevant and poorly-conceived. When there's so much other critical
> commentary dealing with the 'Intro' the fact that this particular chapter was
> "transferred" here to the extent it has been seemed to me to be a covert
> endorsement of its contents. Perhaps it wasn't. Who knows.

Particularly in respect of what McHoul & Wills were saying (about, eg.,
Derrida's "signature, context, event" stuff) it struck me that posting huge,
tedious slabs of their text here without comment or caveat was in fact a way
of promoting their "interpretation", though it isn't really that at all in
respect of the _SL_ 'Intro', so their method of interpretation at least. The
choice to post it and not some other critic's commentary was a discursive
move, and subsequently Dave Monroe did leap to M&W's defence (and, as per
usual, for my throat).

But the fact remains that, along with their travesty of deconstructive
criticism, M&W spend 30-odd pages to make the point that Pynchon doesn't
mention 'MMV' or _GR_ in the 'Intro'. I'd imagine 'MMV' isn't mentioned by
Pynchon because it was decided not to include that story in the collection
(and although it was Pynchon's only published story apart from the _Lot49_
extracts not to make the cut, I'd imagine that there were quite a few
unpublished stories which aren't represented in the 'Intro' either, some of
which have turned up, perhaps in altered guise, in the later novels), but
I'd agree that it will be interesting to discuss why that particular
decision was made; and as noted there does seem to be a glancing reference
to major themes in _GR_ (in Pynchon's comments about "the Bomb" and "racial
differences" especially). To me it seems as if Pynchon is happy to let _GR_
stand on its merits: he doesn't need to mention it here, he knows it's good
and he knows we know it's good. But, in fact, the 'Intro' does say quite a
bit about Pynchon's overall literary and cultural influences, his formative
years and the predominant themes in his work, and if taken at his word some
of the stories do reveal even more about other events and periods in his own
life. The interesting thing is, some readers and critics need to discount
what Pynchon says about himself and his fiction in the 'Intro' because it
just doesn't fit with what they so desperately want his work to be about.

best