TPPM Watts: Back to you

[Paul Nightingale]

I certainly agree that the Watts essay is "a powerful and effective
piece of writing", making it an ideal topic for discussion on Pynchon-l.
However, in the interests of clarity, I need to correct one or two
misleading impressions that have crept into jbor's response to my
introduction.

I haven't suggested that Pynchon "position[s] himself or his reader as a
tourist". What I have said is that the text juxtaposes one kind of
imaginary reader to another, and this is underscored in the first use of
"you". For jbor, the essay is "a piece of investigative journalism"; for
me it is writing that, discursively, borrows from, and is aligned to,
both anthropology and ethnography. One might ask where investigative
journalism comes from. Intertextuality is frowned upon, I know, but this
is how and why the tourism metaphor becomes pertinent, given the way in
which anthropology and ethnography catered (and indeed might still
cater) for, and to, an armchair audience seeking some kind of vicarious
pleasure (and I would suggest that enlightenment leading to empathy is
indeed pleasurable). This, I think, is what jbor refers to as "part of
the problem", although he doesn't follow through on what makes it
problematic. Pynchon, of course, does precisely that. The question posed
by the Watts text is, precisely, this: how does the reader achieve
commitment? Or, put another way: how does reading become active rather
than passive?

Furthermore, even though the NY audience might well be both black and
white 'in reality', I think it fair to say the text constructs an
imaginary reader who is white: that is, just to spell it out, a reader
who aligns him/her/themself with the white culture the text goes on to
describe--about which I'll say no more here, since I intend to cover
this in greater detail when I continue my introduction.

And just for the record, before I'm accused of avoiding it like the
plague--I have already said I intend to cover the Watts essay's
relationship to other P-texts later. My reference to CoL49 was simply to
point out the connection other writers had reported; my intention wasn't
to ignore, or downplay, the (obvious?) relevance of "TSI". However, I
think it interesting that P-texts at this time are endeavouring to do
what was perhaps less than fashionable--relate race and class (certainly
relevant to the way the Watts essay progresses, of course). This is one
connection, also, with the 1983/84 essays (including the SL
introduction, of course) that precede the publication of VL.