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

[tess marek]

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> on 11/1/03 12:12 AM, tess marek at
> tessmarek at yahoo.com wrote:
> 
> > Well, I'm sure you agree that there is a big
> > difference between writing from experience
> (Pynchon
> > does this, i.e., the navy, Long Island, so on, but
> for
> > some reason he uses strategies to limit the the
> > autobigraphical elements) and creating a distance
> > between oneself as author (and implied author) and
> > narrative agency and/or character. Pynchon fails
> to do
> > this in Low-lands. This flaw, when combined with
> the
> > attitudes, is what is off-putting. Intro.21
> 
> While I do agree with much else you've written in
> this thread, I've reread
> page 21 of the 'Intro' and I don't see the
> connection you are making between
> Pynchon not "creating a distance" and the attitudes
> disclosed in
> 'Low-lands'. The point he makes in relation to this
> story is that the
> characters, narrative voice and Pynchon himself all
> shared the same
> attitudes. You seem to be arguing that had he
> disguised the fact that his
> own attitudes coincided with Flange's and the
> narrator's everything would be
> hunky dory. Put another way, had there been a
> "distance" then Flange's or
> the narrator's attitudes would have to have been
> different, and it would
> have been a different story altogether.
> 
> The fact that there is an identification between the
> author (implied and
> actual), the narrative voice and the central
> character is not a flaw. It's a
> technique.


This story is far from hunky-dory. 

Technique is simply a choice that the author makes. I
think that the narrative technique is both
inappropriate for this tale and its use flawed. The
Distance and whatever it is that gives us the sense,
from word to word, from line to line, from page to
page, from scene to scene, from beginning to end
(Style?), that the author sees more deeply and judges
more profoundly then his characters is not managed
well by young Tom Pynchon. 
Furthermore, his flawed use of the technique exposes
his adolescent attitudes. An author makes choices and
these choices require skill. What narrative technique
will he use? What characters will he use? What
episodes and scenes will he include? What stories will
be told and who will tell them? What ideas will he
incorporate into the tale? All these may be considered
techniques. The use of a particular technique may not
be appropriate to a particular tale or it may be
appropriate but the use of it may be flawed. The
flawed use of the "identification" narrative can be
easily identified when we examine the style and the
tone of the tale. In this story, the tone exposes the
implicit evaluations that the author manages to convey
to the reader. In other words, the author comments on
the explicit presentation of the action or what the
characters say or should have said or thought. 


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