Maxine is not Pynchon

[Fiona Shnapple]

"...we must never forget that though the author can to some extent
choose his disguises, he can never choose to disappear” (20).  Booth,
TRF


I'm a bit surprised to read all these comments about Pynchon, the
author we know so little about, really, and even more so by the claim
that Maxine is, somehow Thomas Pynchon who lives on the UWS. While
Pynchon may have somethings in common with his protagonist, to argue
direct autobiographical readings is absurd for several reasons.

First, as noted, we don't know Pynchon. He's worked hard to protect
his privacy.

Sure, he published Slow Learner,  and in it he talks a good deal about
how his life and the times he lived in, places where he lived, so on,
were essential to his writing, that at first he tried to reject the
"autobiographical fictions" but that he came to understand that he
needed to get out and live and then get his life into his books, but
that doesn't  invite us to read his works as works of autobiography.

If, as Pynchon's novels argue, again and again, language can not
mirror reality, why would Pynchon try to do this? He doesn't. Not his
world or ours or anybody else's

Moreover, language can construct meaning. New, novel meaning, and this
is one of the things Pynchon does so well, he explores and examines
our use of language, deconstructs, then he constructs meaning with his
novel use of words. Why we would want to pin him down to a meaning
that is easy to get at by pinning his protagonist to his life tells us
more about our inadequacies, our failures to read his books than about
how he writes or who he is. The meaning is contextualized. To drag it
out and staple it to a dying animal, as Roth's little book that takes
its title from that famous Yeats poem argues, is to drain it of its
beauty and life, the life we bring to it when we encounter it on the
page.

While I think RL has identified a fairly obvious trend that reflects
the maturation of the man who wrote these books, to argue that he is
more keen on family life is one argument, to claim that he is Maxine,
that he is a rich man who therefore can't write about the preterit of
some such nonsense is, frankly, stupid.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l