SLSL 'Low-lands': racist, sexist and fascist talk

[tess marek]

--- Malignd <malignd at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I wish I had been able to follow this thread more
> closely.
> 
> I know that Pynchon himself raised the issue of
> attitude and voice in the Intro, but isn't something
> being grossly simplified and misunderstood when a
> writer is held accountable for the attitudes of
> created characters in a work of fiction (including,
> as
> a character, the assumed voice of a third-person
> narrator)?  

No, because that's not what this thread has been about
at all. We have not simplified or misunderstood what
Pynchon says in the Introduction (again, see page 11)
or the story. 


In Low-Lands we have a third person observer
narrator-agent. In terms of the issues we're
discussing it's not all that significant that the
story is told third person. There is no reason to hold
an author accontable for the attitudes of his narrator
based on Person. So if the tale were told First
Person, that fact alone would not permit us to hold
the author accountable for the attitudes of the first
person narrator. However, TRP tells us that his "own
adolescent values were able to creep in and wreck an
otherwise sympathetic character."  (SL, Intro.9) The
otherwise sympathetic character is Dennis Flange. P
set out to write a story with Pig as the protagonist,
but he ended up writing a tale about Flange. With
Flange we have author identification and as Quail
mentioned, reader identification is not unlikely
because Flange is a sympathetic character. There is
little that is all that unattractive about him, let
alone repugnant or offensive. Moreover, his problem,
while it is P's problem to an extent (although P notes
that he was not married at the time and he was
obviously not Flange's age), is a problem that *could*
have been a general one in the US at the time, so
identification is to some extent, expected. That being
said we have the problem of the talk in the story that
P says will put off Modern readers. That talk is
offensive not because Modern readers won't or should
not accept talk that is not PC or racist or sexist or
proto-fascist. Hell, what would literature be if we
stripped it of every character and narrator that
doesn't talk like a Politically Correct mouthpiece? It
would be nothing less than propaganda and sermon. The
racist talk in the tale is not offensive because
forty-odd years later we have reached the mountain
top. NO! And I'm not put off by the fact that Pynchon
had Archie Bunker's attitudes or Playboy's when he was
a young writer. In fact, I'm impressed by his honesty
and his efforts to change his attitudes. But, if
Nabokov was homophobic, if Eliot was anti-Semitic,
Melville was Anti-Catholic, and their fictions and
poems are infected with these unacceptable attitudes,
it's puts us off and it should. Such is the case with
Low-Lands. 

   
> 
> The writer may be held properly accountable for the
> esthetic success of his story; criticism of his
> characters (and their attitudes) addressed at
> whether
> they are effectively created and portrayed:  if
> one's
> character is racist or sexist, is he believably so. 
> Whatever misgivings Pynchon may have about the
> characters he created, those misgivings need not,
> nor
> should they, color aonyone else's reading.  They are
> interesting re Pynchon, but are wholly external to
> the
> story.

All true, but that's not the issue Pynchon raises in
the Introduction and that's not what we have been
discussing here. 


> 
> (If, in coming in late, I've missed points covered
> and
> clarified earlier, ignore all this.  (Or ignore it
> for
> your own reasons.))
> 
> Malignd

The problem, the flaw, as I see it, is one of
Distance. 
In this story, the aethtic distance flaws are
compounded by the moral )adolescent values) distance
ones. 

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