P defends V. ...

[Mark Kohut]

Robin,

I think there is a long, detailed, years-in-the writing, work on this 
theory.....one who loves P enough can feel, as Laura can, as Alice could, as you 
do, as ohters on this list could, knowing something about P's vision, FEEL when 
it is more P's real self than an other's self....maybe, purely speculatively of 
course, if we never learn more about him, when one character (or even part of a 
character) is not from within him but more from observation, empathy, Keats's 
negative capablity............

I once had this wayward thot: that soft flab on Benny and esp. Slothrop is P's 
novelistic metaphor for .....sloth. [there is that name]. We know P read at 
least some Sam Johnson...wrote a great paper on Rasselas, said his 
teacher....and Johnson felt lazy off and on all his life.......

I am, as I've posted, been reading me some Shakespeare, the most personally 
hidden major author ever, maybe, but the scholar-readers try to find bits of the 
"real' Shakespeare in certain characters and just in certain speeches........

Mark



----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Mon, August 30, 2010 5:53:47 PM
Subject: Re: P defends V. ...

I don't find this theory despicable, it's highly plausible.  Publicity-shy 
Pynchon keeps his ego out of public view.  If there were an all-knowing 
super-confidant character in any of his books (Yashmeen?), I can't see P (young 
or old) using that character as a mouthpiece.  Slothrop and Benny are both 
described as physically kind of flabby - something which Pynchon doesn't seem to 
have been (in his few pictures), but in their state of paranoid, clueless, but 
not unintelligent schlemiel-dom, they seem to embody something of the 
self-deprecating, regretful author's voice of Slow Learner.  No literary 
evidence to support this - just gut feeling.

Laura

-----Original Message-----

>From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
>
>I'm going to throw out a despicable theory—find a passive-voiced  
>central figure in a Pynchon novel, look for echos of the author. Zoyd,  
>Slothrop, Benny, Doc, Mucho Maas.