ATDTDA (18): intro

[Mark Kohut]

whole long articles could be written with these distinctions...I like them.

kelber at mindspring.com wrote:  There are several levels:

Level one: the way people normally speak: incoherent, half-formed sentences that trail off and are filled with qualifiers, pauses, etc.: "It's just that kinda, you know?"

Level two: genre fiction ineptly trying to give the flavor of a time and place by emphasizing catch-phrases: "Howdy there, partner." "I say, old chap!"

Then, Pynchon, by turns parodying and/or making the genre-speak more literary. "Person can't get no damn sleep around here..." "Well some sort of Eastern wog Nigel." [notice the odd lack of commas in the last, as if N and N are speaking in stock phrases, rather than real sentences.]

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut 

> 
> BUT, what I want to pick up on and ask us all to jump in on John's work here is: how much of all that dialogue out of genre fiction SUPPOSED to show how unreal/ mediated by our fictions has been so much of our American life?.....
> 
> I love to talk in movie/book quotes.....how genuine then is my speech? (to get personal)...yet we all also live in 'daylit fictions" that the culture has created, no?
> 
> How much of the dialogue IS as 'pure' and natural as a tree, say (one of Pynchon's good things)...
> 
> MK
>
>John Bailey wrote:
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. 




       
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