Pynchon on his characters

[Dave Monroe]

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at gmail.com> wrote:

> H is not really telling Pynchon how he feels (somewhat disinherited)  but
> only telling us how Pynchon feels
>
> Nevertheless it's a little presumptuous.
>
> And probably inaccurate IMHO.

I'm not quite sure why we grant "authors" any greater credibility than
we do, say, witnesses on the stand, analysands on the couch,
interviewees caught in the crossfire, kids caught with tehir hands in
the cookie jar, what have you.  Writers of whatever stripe operate
under their own self-interests/delusions/and so forth, whether they
are conscious of them or not.  Hollander delineates a long line of
"disinheritance" or what have you along Pynchon's lineage, one
acknowledged by The Author himself in the figure of Wm. Slothrop.
Whether or not it otherwise figured consciously to Pynchon as he wrote
is beside the point.  And this is coming from someone raised on both
the modernist AND the postmodernist disdain for tainting criticism
with biography (thouigh also someone heir to both Freud and Jameson on
the unconscious) ...

... but I'm also thinking taht Pynchon's response is most immediately
one to commentary Hollander made and has made public on the short
stories, seeing as they're the immediate topic at hand, though I'd
have o ask The Dude himself about that ...