ATDTDA (18): intro

[John Bailey]

In the Slow Learner intro, Pynchon laments his bad ear - his failure to really get dia- and ideolects - finding in his early stories attempts to render realistic speech patterns somehow lacking. What's the point of pointing this out? It could be a diversionary tactic: I can't do this stuff, so just let it go. Plot's in the same boat, there. But I can also see how admitting to these early errors might be the work of an author who's made conscious and sustained attempts to remedy them.
 
I've always been either fascinated or confused by Pynchon's dialogue. In V. it often seems weird, though others have written that the Whole Sick Crew bits have a kind of verisimilitude I can't get. In Vineland, Takeshi's speech set off a few bells, its obviously unnatural rhythms (all those elongated hyphens and exclamation marks) interrupting the expected flow of speech. It was Takeshi who got me thinking that at some point Pynchon had moved on from trying to plausibly represent natural dialogue and had engaged a different kind of aesthetic. 
 
M&D made that intuition concrete. How do you accurately replicate in print the speech patterns of people centuries removed, when all you have is printed texts from the era? Like Takeshi’s speech, I think M&D plays with the way our idea of another person's words might be dependent on the methods in which they're delivered.
 
I still think AtD is a masterful mediation of generic intertexts and a realist story. The point here for me might be the way in which the recorded discourse of a particular period doesn't just selectively refigure actual utterances, but informs future speech as well. If AtD's characters sometimes sound more like the characters of period-specific spy novels, or adventure stories, or hardboiled fiction (and they do), those works also affected the way real people spoke at the time. Do P-listers use P-phrases? Two-way street, and all.
 
And so, to England.
 
The language here seems to me markedly different to that of the preceding chapter.
 
Dialogue: “Tace, you’d ever been up in those damn mountains you’d know, it was just so hard, never let up, you worked at all, that’s who you worked for.”
 
That “you’d ever been” – “if” omitted, “you had” contracted – perfectly realises for me the accent employed here. It’s not a Californian accent or any kind of eastern US one. I don’t know if other US P-listers get that same feel, or even if non-US-ers do; I think it’s partly because I’m reading from a country with a great deal of cultural product coming from the States, but still alien to it – same can be said about AtD’s UK sections, where the language is so familiar to me, but only through intertexts. The dialogue above has a lot of commas – no surprises, being Pynchon and all – but compare it to the dialogue that opens the next chapter:
 
“Yes well perhaps you did, but I saw the left one, didn’t I?” 
 
Those first five words run on like an over-excited English toff, don’t they?
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