Very Half-Totally Wrong, imho.

[Ian Livingston]

Yes, I stand by my assertion that we can cipher only clues. What we
make of those clues is determined (at least) as much by our own
experience and expectations as by the context in which we find them.
The facts and sources a fiction writer works with certainly say
something about the writer, but what, exactly? The way those sources
inform the action of the story says something, too, about the writer,
but we can't really say what. We can look at the same sources and
critique the action, but what we are critiquing is the text, not the
writer. We might comment on any number of things textually revealed
without knowing the author's actual intent, psychology, or political
positions. We DO know a few things from those extra-textual clues P
gives us in his few self-revelatory essays, such as the SL intro, the
Luddite piece, and blurbs on other writers, etc. And we can apply
those to our critique of the texts, but -- and it seems to me this is
especially true with a writer like P (or Emily Dickinson, Homer, et
al) -- we still do not know the writer. When we come to literature, we
confront ourselves, and (my take on authorial genius) a great writer
causes us to see ourselves in ways that cause us -- oh, how shall I
say it? -- noble discomfort.

On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 11:49 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:
> Ian Livingston SEZ:
>
>> ...what we really find is our own views projected into the work.
>
> Ya think?
>
> From the introduction to Slow Learner, on "sources" -- his scare quotes --
> for the Egyptian episode in V: "Loot the Baedeker I did, all the details of
> a time and place I had never been to, right down to the names of the
> diplomatic corps. Who’d make up a name like Khevenhüller-Metsch? Lest others
> become as enchanted as I was AND HAVE CONTINUED TO BE [emphasis mine] with
> this technique, let me point out that it is a lousy way to go about writing
> a story."
>
> I'm ambivalent about this, because he's REALLY good at selecting and
> deploying the details that make me think he's nailed that place and time: my
> father, who'd been in England in 1942-43, found no false notes in the
> look-and-feel passages I read him from GR. It's a trick, it's sleight of
> hand, but he's better by far at it than many historical novelists for whom
> it's their main stock in trade.
>
> Think of his technology, science and math (and history of TS&M) in much the
> same way. Pynchon is more interested in the manifold interpretations and
> implications of "entropy" that Henry Adams and a thousand other
> non-physicists came up with than in the quantity defined by Clausius,
> Boltzmann and Gibbs. Ditto for relativity and spacetime, as I wrote during
> AtDDTA. (And BTW, Robin, not one in a thousand practitioners of CGI knows
> jack about quaternions per se -- while there is a continuity of concept, the
> formalism and terminology have morphed greatly.)
>
> W/r/t the crisis in mathematics, I agree with Ray that P has nothing
> substantive to say about it. But that's not a problem for me, because I
> think he's talking about what the larger culture made of *the idea that math
> could HAVE a 'crisis'* -- that the "pros" were no longer as sure about basic
> notions of number, continuity, commensurability etc. as we had been led to
> believe in elementary school.
>
> -Monte
>
>
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."