Pynchon/Hollander

Mon May 18 11:17:27 CDT 2009

Robin sez:

Is it conceivable that Pynchon actually has trouble drawing from his own experiences or from the life around him for fictional material?

So I say:

First, hi after a long absence.  Second, I really doubt this.  I've heard enough anecdotal evidence of people claiming that this, that or another character are based on them, or that events were based on events in his life.  Third, any novelist doing anything with narrative is going to incorporate bits of his/her life into their writing.  It's nearly impossible not to do it.  Small wonder his later novels have more to do with family after he himself has developed his own.  I do think that he is nobody's idea of a confessional novelist, creating little pynchons in his books.  But they must resonate with elements of his own life, or he would be a much poorer writer than he is.

Chris Broderick
www.myspace.com/christophermichaelbroderick

"A good laugh is the best pesticide."
-Vladimir Nabokov

________________________________
From: pynchon-l-digest <owner-pynchon-l-digest at waste.org>
To: pynchon-l-digest at waste.org
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2009 12:00:03 AM
Subject: pynchon-l-digest V2 #6826

pynchon-l-digest         Monday, May 18 2009         Volume 02 : Number 6826

The Legacy of Secrecy
Re: Pynchon on his characters
Re: Pynchon on his characters
Re: Pynchon on his characters
Re: Pynchon/Hollander
NP: GreatDismal is Wm. Gibson on twitter
Re: curiouser and curioser
Is the Tristero Made up of Women?
Atdtda30: Among the labyrinths, 854

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 13:56:32 -0500
From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
Subject: The Legacy of Secrecy

http://www.legacyofsecrecy.com/

The first portion of the Introduction and Overview is available at
Buzzflash.com.

http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/7136

Chapter One and the Epilogue of Legacy of Secrecy can be read online
at the Mary Ferrell Foundation web site at:

http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Legacy_of_Secrecy

http://www.legacyofsecrecy.com/excerpts.html

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 12:00:52 -0700
From: Keith <keithsz at mac.com>
Subject: Re: Pynchon on his characters

On May 17, 2009, at 11:15 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:

... but Hollander is hardly  making Pynchon rather than his texts "the
event."  He's reading tehm--closley--alongside as close a reading as
is publically possible of Pynchon's personal, genalogical and
historical context ...

Yeah, I, too, lean towards the Joplin side of that argument. When  
Raquel and I were in seminary school together we used to go round and  
round about the Book of Revelation and whether or not this or that  
was Authorial intent or was about Heilsgeschichte or drug induced  
imagery or code for current events designed to get past Them for the  
sake of Us. Pick a lens any lens, and the whole damned thing coughs  
up evidence galore to support whichever. It's all part of the fun,  
but when one gets all literal about it, it becomes our favorite  
condition, the proverbial paranoia.

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 14:10:58 -0500
From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Pynchon on his characters

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 2:00 PM, Keith <keithsz at mac.com> wrote:

> Yeah, I, too, lean towards the Joplin side of that argument. When Raquel and
> I were in seminary school together we used to go round and round about the
> Book of Revelation and whether or not this or that was Authorial intent or
> was about Heilsgeschichte or drug induced imagery or code for current events
> designed to get past Them for the sake of Us. Pick a lens any lens, and the
> whole damned thing coughs up evidence galore to support whichever. It's all
> part of the fun, but when one gets all literal about it, it becomes our
> favorite condition, the proverbial paranoia.

A tightrope walk which Pynchon generally performs with aplomb ...

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 12:18:18 -0700
From: Keith <keithsz at mac.com>
Subject: Re: Pynchon on his characters

On May 17, 2009, at 12:10 PM, Dave Monroe wrote:

A tightrope walk which Pynchon generally performs with aplomb ...

I agree....while juggling genres, perspectives etc etc, and yanking  
rugs.

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 17:03:20 -0400
From: "Paul Mackin" <mackin.paul at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Pynchon/Hollander

- ----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robin Landseadel" <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 17, 2009 2:10 PM
Subject: Pynchon/Hollander

> Of course, it is also possible that these themes find their way into 
> Pynchon's writings for simpler reasons:

[reasons other than the type messages Hollander has decryted for us.]

>
> ". . . I just don't think you ought to be writing about me. The sad
> truth is that you're giving me much too much credit. My own
> research is nowhere near as deep or as conscientious as
> yours. It is, in fact, as shallow as I think I can get away with,
> because I don't write 'novels of ideas.' 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, and the less of
> it I have to do, the better for me cause I'm lazy. . . .
>
> I would offer up that more likely than not, what ends up in Pynchon's 
> books has a lot more to do with the quotidian details of the author's 
> life than the author would ever want to have the public at large to  know. 
> And I suspect the man has good reasons for us not to know the  reasons or 
> details.

We don't know much about his ordinary life, do we?

He's very un-autobiographical in the novels. (with a few exceptions)

Of course you may still be right.

However right now I'm considering that the opposite might be more the case.

The thing I'm intrigued with at the moment is his insistence (in the passage 
quoted above) that the admittedly big ideas that pervade his novels serve 
not themselves, but as a milieu, as it were, for his characters to act out 
their lives and run free.  Just the thing he gets criticized  (justly or 
unjustly) for not doing by critics like James Wood for example.

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.

P.

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 16:23:24 -0700 (PDT)
From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
Subject: NP: GreatDismal is Wm. Gibson on twitter

@GreatDismal The Reverse Nuremberg defense: "I was only giving orders."

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 19:25:25 -0400
From: Joe Allonby <joeallonby at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: curiouser and curioser

Down the rabbit hole.

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 6:30 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> "Things then...turning curious"--rather standard detective novel boilerplate?
> And this echo? "Curioser and curiouser", said Alice. [from In Wonderland]
>
> Oedipa, like Alice, is trying to figure out
> "what the hell is going on" as one plister aptly put it.
>
>
>
>

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 21:52:49 -0400
From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
Subject: Is the Tristero Made up of Women?

at least in Chapter 3 much of the references to the Tristero are
linked to a female--. for example:

who first steers Oedipa to the Courier's Tragedy?  one of the Paranoid's chicks
where does Oedipa first see the message sent from WASTE--in the ladies bathroom
when the black-clad figures appear in the play they are described as
effeminate--they are assumed to be men but maybe they're women?
Oedipa backstage sees a girl removing fake blood who motions her into
mirror-filled region(?)--Niccollo's blood?
references to the Maenids--The maenids were wild and were known to rip
men apart in their crazed dancing--Niccollo is murdered by three
figures with a "dancer's grace"-suddenly in lithe and terrible
silence"-which oddly connects to the Baudelaire's poem which describes
the beauty of the sculpted figure as "twin goddesses present, grace
and force" and "what unknown evil harrows her lithe side"

The Mask of Tristero is female?

rich

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 05:10:32 +0100
From: "Paul Nightingale" <isread at btinternet.com>
Subject: Atdtda30: Among the labyrinths, 854

>From a "quaint native artifact, with its colorful yet indecipherable
visions" (853) to cinema, albeit a location "traditionally said to be the
site of Marco Polo's house" (854), that "traditionally" suggesting the claim
is made repeatedly, just as "they had gotten in the habit" offers repetitive
behaviour. Cf. Reef, "drift[ing] round Nice for a while" (849) as the
chapter opens: these characters are asked to mark time, waiting for what?

Previously, a "sketch of a mindscape whose layers emerged one on another as
from a mist, a distant country of painful complexity ..." etc (853). Here,
the manufactured tracking shot ("from a gondola") "in dreaming glide ..."
etc (854).  From "workshops full of caligraphers and illustrators" (853) to
a "[film] crew from Lumiere of Paris" (954).

Different kinds of text, from the "all but unmappable flow of letters and
numbers that passed into and out of the guise of the other, not to mention
images, from faint and spidery sketches to a full spectrum of inks and
pastels" (853) to "uncountable brown canalsides ..." etc (854). And so to
Vlado's "pitch of apprehension", Yashmeen reading his reading of a reading:
previously, "the secret lore he'd been sworn never to reveal" (853). One
does identify with the camera, not the action.

------------------------------

End of pynchon-l-digest V2 #6826
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