Back to the Future

[Mr Haney]

(put in a kickass night's work & promised myself
an opaque and pretentious morning post to P-list,
here 'tis)
 
 
robinlandseadel wrote:> > 'blue-blood' clan and their associates. I don't really know why> > the author chooses the larger story of his family as the 'spine' of work.> > ....what they were doing way back lands in the author's books.okay, true.  But disguised through the process of art.
 
In the 1st-person narrative of Henry Miller, it sounds prettymuch like he may have actually done all those things.Jack Kerouac similarly, although it seems he takes
a little artistic license so as to seem a nicer guy
 
Though the art for those guys was in the telling and 
enthusiasm, the choice of words, the conveying of the
feelings and so forth - at least in my reading -
still the relatively light dusting of fictionality
served important purposes.
As Dylan sang, "I had to rearrange their faces,
and give them all another name" 
And if you read them you can posit or perpend
or otherwise affix the characters and incidents into
a scheme and worldview to some extent.
 
Then you get somebody like John Barth, who has told & retolda Maryland upbringing in so many ways with little changeshere and there...that he may have just as well made the
whole thing up, each choice of variation meaning something
else in the context of that work and commenting on the
previous works and for all we know, those 
*even at that point* waiting to be written ---
(the guy describes his notebooks at one point, notebooks
planning every phase of existence along the 
plan of Freytag's triangle)
Seems like he is more of a schemer, that the impulse
isn't so much to just tell a story, but to build a 
fictional cathedral.  That the scheming and world-viewing
which are superstructure in Miller and Kerouac 
become integral to the work of Barth
-- and likewise that of Pynchon, that is to say
that although B & P may use incidents from life,
it isn't related and some morals drawn - rather it's
chosen like the sand for the glass in the cathedral of
Mont St Michel...
 
my point, I guess, is that if indeed you did
link up all the characters in the Pynchon oeuvre
with recognizable antecedents, it would still be
possible for an English major with the gift of opacity,
not to mention 2nd nature for a professor or critic,
to build symbolic schemes not from the
originals but from the fabrications (although with
red and blue versions of a family history ready to 
hand they would probably feel enabled both to
synthesize those with each other, and to relate the
views implied by all three to the fictioneering views
in the novels) 
 
although what you may be indicating is that
we don't want to, and in fact can't really get
too far away from reality as it's lived...
 
 
 
 
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