Pynchon/Hollander

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Paul Mackin:
 
> Is it conceivable that Pynchon actually has trouble drawing from his own
> experiences or from the life around him for fictional material? So he
> searches the libraries of the world for all those bizarre ideas to put the
> people he wants to deeply care about into sufficiently hysterical
> situations that they may react and become real fully developed characters?
>
> A big leap I know but if we're really going to take Pynchon at his word we
> gotta consider it.

 
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.
 
/Tore
 
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