Pynchon on his characters

[Paul Mackin]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Monroe" <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
To: "Kai Frederik Lorentzen" <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 17, 2009 10:17 AM
Subject: Re: Pynchon on his characters


> On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 6:06 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
>> While Hollander's insisting on the political dimension in Pynchon's work
>> cannot be praised high enough, his monomanic dogmatism is really 
>> difficult
>> to handle. Perhaps Thomas "every weirdo on the planet seems to be on my
>> wave-length" Pynchon did realize this from early on. Just a guess --
>
> The first, and perhaps most, significant thing here is, Pynchon
> bothered to respond at all.  It's not unreasonable to assume that
> there were Reasons for that ...

The most obvious reason would be that some kind of an answer to Hollander's 
direct question was required.

(I'm assuming the question was, is Pynchon interested in having his early 
work republished in a single volume.)

The answer, as far as Hollander was concerned anyway, was no.

The appearance later of "Slow Learner" is a whole separate topic.

P.