Why TRP disses his own most popular work.

[Mark Kohut]

Rereading Slow Learner, Intro first, I am reminded directly
of P's words: "Disagreeable as I find Low-lands now, it's
nothing compared to my bleakness of heart when I have to look at "Entropy".
The story is a fine example of a procedural error beginning writers are
always being cautioned against. *It is simply wrong to begin with a theme,
symbol*
*or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters *
*and events to conform to it.....But the distance and grandiosity of this
[entropy] *
*led me to short-change the humans in the story. *
*                                   ---SL p.12-13*
*Since TRP very soon will say that with the long story marketed as a *
*novel in which he "seemed to have forgotten most of what I thought *
*I'd learned up till then" *
                                    ---SL p. 22

Below is a recent attempt by me to characterize possible reasons TRP
disses The Crying of Lot 49 in his maturity. Had I remembered the above
lines more precisely, don't they express from TRP himself, surely
his reasons????
Seems so clear to me this morn. Is it a consensus opinion? I.e. not
a consensus about Crying but about TRP's own later judgment?

And can we not see from The Secret Integration on thru all the novels,
he tried to get breathing people, flat, two-dimensional or round more onto
the pages---as much as any 'theme, symbol of other unifying agent"?


____________________________________________________
But, here's a notion I have had about Crying for awhile so did
feel--you want to talk projection, OK?--this reading as I read
straight through (with, of course, a lot of internalized knowledge and
opinion). It is loaded with symbolism; it can hit one, as it did my
first baffled reading, as a game of Clue so to speak. Yes, the reality
and meaning of Tristero and The Courier's Tragedy text for Oedipa is
overt and the major part of the first bafflement but I don't mean
that. Once you accept that, you still have all the curious things that
happen. All the scenes full of 'clues' to sort out AND all of the
curious things that are on the page between all the scenes. From the
TV and the expectant revelation and the early tower allusions and on
and on. All that density of allusion that scholars and all of us have
been getting off on all these years. One might say, per the above,
that the story hardly "breathes".

I tentatively off this as why TRP might no longer like the story as we
all do. Please discuss.
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