IV "autobiographical"?

[Michael Bailey]

Doug Millison wrote:

> How to separate Pynchon the person from the characters in his books? This is
> the question that seems to animate Pynchon-L more than any other.
<snippage of nice argumentation>
>

on the surface, no problem at all!
I argue it thus:
Pynchon the person I haven't met.
He's a really good writer.  That's just his job though...  Anything I
can say about him the person would be limited to the same amount
of stuff I could say about anyone else that I haven't met.


Nevertheless, as you note, there is still interest in the person.
And the way you laid it out made me realize that in reading the books
it just happens to be a lot more fun to do if, around the act of
reading, you
imagine the author whose mind created them.  As if there is another
story intersticed, counterpointed between that of someone reading
(which, viewed from the outside, like the movie of Pee Wee Herman as
Robert Musil in _Vineland_, is not all that exciting to watch)
and that of the purely imaginary characters in the book (mad exciting,
but of course imaginary)
-- which third story is that of the author, the happy medium for the
tale, who is
more interesting than the reader-while-reading, and more real than the story...

well, that's not all that coherent, but you know what I mean.



-- 
"My God, I am fully in favor of a little leeway or the damnable jig is
up! " - Hapworth Glass