PBPB Pynchon's Intro to Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (BDSLILLUTM)

[Doug Millison]

Introduction to Fariña's 
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

Text at 
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_farina.html


P's obvious affection for Farina and his
sentimentalization of his own earlier years, strike me
in this introduction.  

Pynchon creates the two of them, himself and Farina,
as characters. Obvious parallels to the Slow Learner
Intro, re repression (sex, drugs, rock 'n roll), jazz.

Pynchon doesn't give the novel much of an evaluation,
aside from praising Farina's effort at creating
characters who distinguish themselves from real people
at Cornell:  "He really worked his ass off, but the
result is so graceful that the first time around I was
fooled completely."  It's possible that Pynchon is
going out of his way to criticize the novel.

Sounds as if Pynchon may have had his own Hemingway
phase; it was pretty difficult for any young American
writer to get out of Hemingway's shadow in the '50s, P
seems to go out of his way to distance himself from H
here.  It might be interesting to read P's short
stories in the light of H's.  By distancing himself
from Hemingway, and identifying an affinity for Scott
Fitzgerals, P seems to use this intro to position
himself in the American literary landscape; he does
even more of this in the Slow Learner intro.


Publication date for this intro?


" 'Immunity has been granted to me,' thinks Gnossos,
'for I do not lose my cool.' Backed up by a range of
street-wise skills like picking locks and scoring
dope, Cool gets Gnossos through, and it lies at the
heart of his style."  
-- re "cool",  sounds like a  well-known motto plucked
from V.


"he as Hemingway, I as Scott Fitzgerald, each of us
aware that the other had been through a phase of
enthusiasm for his respective author" 
-- assuming this is not merely an exercise in
misdirection for P readers, Gatsby (or other
Fitzgerald work) as an influence on Pynchon seems
obvious; anybody care to suggest how this might be
reflected in P's work?


"Back in his Hemingway phase, Fariña must have seen
that line about every true story ending in death.
Death, no idle prankster, is always, in this book,
just outside the window. The cosmic humor is in
Gnossos's blundering attempts to make some kind of
early arrangement with Thanatos, to find some kind of
hustle that will get him out of the mortal contract
we're all stuck with. Nothing he tries works, but even
funnier than that, he's really too much in love with
being alive, with dope, sex, rock 'n' roll--he feels
so good he has to take chances, has to keep tempting
death, only half-realizing that the more intensely he
lives, the better the odds of his number finally
coming up."
--mindless pleasures can't finesse Death, echoes in
many of Pynchon's works; in this intro's ending, P
also reflects the irrational hope for some sort of
return from death found in his works, most recently in
Mason's interactions with Rebeka's ghost; this morose
acceptance of death's finality see-sawing with the
hope of an afterlife, a constant in P's work.

Any and all comments welcome...


























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