Never the Twain

[Robin Landseadel]

You're a lot more interesting when you're coherent.

I was in Watts, in 1966, I was not a tourist. That whole tourist/homie  
dichotomy—with that romantic/realist divide you speak of—is very  
clearly expressed in Inherent Vice.

In many ways, Inherent Vice can be read as the 40-acre annex to the  
intro of Slow Learner.

"What a Sap She had!"

On Aug 23, 2010, at 6:07 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> Not the point. The point is, the young reader misread Twain. Strong
> misreadings make strong young authors. The Secret Integration, from
> the wart to the tree climbing and schemes, is a response to Twain. In
> Twain, the conflict of realism (Huck) and romanticism (Tom) in HF
> begins with fairly harmless teasing of Jim and the Don Quixote attack
> on a picnic, but later, when Tom risks Jim's life with his romantic
> prison break, after Jim has risked his freedom to save Tom, the
> conflict is pushed to a dangerous level, but Huck doesn't learn a
> thing about being a Black man. Huck isn't changed. He sez, he always
> knew Jim was white on the inside. Pynchon's parody assumes that Huck
> is changed; some romantic lesson has been learned by Huck. P's TSI is
> a parody of this this "romantic" theme, how one learns from nature and
> from Native Americans and African Americans or the Other, but the
> parody doesn't work because Twain's novel is not romantic; Huck, like
> the boys in the tale, Grover & Co., don't learn or grow by meeting the
> Black man. Like Benny, they don't learn a thing. So P misreads Twain,
> writes a parody of the romantic coming of age novel.
>
> Yeah, young P could have learned a lot more but he was a slow learner.
> And, he was very smart, but still quite young. Also, I'm sure I've
> read his books and Twains more than he has. ;--)