Pynchon and his characters

[Rob Jackson]

Yes, and TSI is where we first meet up with a member of the Slothrop  
family too. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to see Tyrone S  
and some of the other male protagonists as self-projections. Oedipa  
also. Profane and Stencil seem to embody different aspects of the  
author's personality, as well as his literary method.

There is a lot of attention to 'historical detail' in the novels -  
think of the layers of detritus on top of Slothrop's desk, for  
example. His characters wear the clothes (e.g., Oedipa's "dark green  
bubble shades" filling up with tears in front of the Varo painting),  
and inhabit the mindset of the era in which the action is set. This  
attention to detail is less conspicuous than "the heavy thotz and  
capitalized references and shit" which Pynchon sez in the letter "are  
in there to advance action, set scenes, fill in characters and so  
forth", but it's actually a lot of work for the novelist to be build  
up that sort of historical verisimilitude. There's a strong and  
insistent throb of 'realism' at the heart of Pynchon's postmodernism,  
and he does indeed write "historical fiction" as well as  
"historiographical metafiction".

The other aspect of Pynchon's personal life that always gets played  
down is the fact that he switched degrees to become an English major  
after his stint in the navy. His comments about the "Chicago School"  
and lit crit in the SL Intro, his overview of trends in American  
fiction, familiarity with Hemingway, Eliot, et al., even his 'day job'  
writing novel blurbs, introductions and literary reviews in the  
subsequent years, show him to be qualified, willing and able to  
operate in the field of literary criticism. He's a different type of  
'literary academic' to William Gass or James Wood, for example, but  
it's still fair to describe him as such.

all best


On 19/05/2009, at 2:24 AM, Tore Rye Andersen wrote:

> This is all just conjecture, of course, but my guess is that a lot  
> of Pynchon's
> personal experiences find their way into his work, through the  
> "strategy of
> transfer" he describes in his introduction to Slow Learner (in  
> connection
> with "The Secret Integration"):
>
> "Why I adopted such a strategy of transfer is no longer clear to me.  
> Displacing
> my personal experience off into other environments went back at  
> least as far
> as "The Small Rain." Part of this was an unkind impatience with  
> fiction I felt
> then to be "too autobiographical." Somewhere I had come up with the  
> notion that
> one's personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth,  
> as everyone
> knows, is nearly the direct opposite."
>
> Even though Pynchon is critical of this "strategy of transfer," I  
> think it remains
> an important modus operandi for him, and that he has been doing it  
> all along. If
> we are to believe Jules Siegel's Playboy-article, e.g., the incident  
> with Jessica
> pulling off her blouse in the car has its counterpart in Pynchon's  
> own experiences.
>
> Also, in one of his letters to Candida Donadio (quoted in NYT in  
> March 1998), Pynchon
> at one point writes (in what might have been a response to a  
> suggestion that he write
> his autobiography): "As for spilling my life story, I try to do that  
> all the time.
> Nobody ever wants to listen, for some strange reason." Of course  
> this may just be a
> joking reference to the usual drunk pub bore who wants to tell us  
> his troubles, but it
> could also easily be construed as a sly reference to his strategy of  
> transfer.
>
> So on the one hand it seems very likely to me that a lot of scenes  
> and characters in
> Pynchon's novels draw on his own experience; on the other hand this  
> shouldn't
> interfere with our reading of his texts. As Pynchon's editor Corlies  
> Smith said
> of Pynchon in an article back in 1990: "He did say to me that the  
> only thing that
> mattered was the printed page." So 'admitting' that his personal  
> life has a lot to
> do with his fiction is not the same as inviting us to look for  
> correspondences between
> his life and his fiction, just as we shouldn't look too closely at  
> what goes into
> making sausages - just enjoy those sausages!
>
> For the record, I do believe that Pynchon is slightly overstating  
> his case when he
> tells Hollander that:
>
> "Plot and character come first, just like with most other folks's  
> stuff, and the heavy
> thotz and capitalized references and shit are in there to advance  
> action, set scenes,
> fill in characters and so forth [...]"
>
> In his letter in defense of Ian McEwan, Pynchon tells us that he  
> writes "historical
> fiction," and surely the impetus behind novels like GR, M&D and AtD  
> isn't a desire to
> introduce us to various interesting characters, but rather to write  
> about different crucial
> periods in history. What informs Pynchon's writing more than  
> anything else is what in V. he
> calls "historical care," and sometimes historical care involves  
> putting heavy
> thotz before characters.