Re: Pynchon’s Layers Statement

[Allen Ruch]

I was wondering about Joe’s reference myself. I don’t recall Pynchon making that remark, yet it did ring a distant bell: maybe someone else said it about him, or maybe Pynchon said it in a review of another’s writing?

Larry and I gathered the vast majority of Pynchon’s uncollected writing here:

http://shipwrecklibrary.com/the-modern-word/pynchon/sl-essays/

Anyway, I just searched all these pieces of “uncollected” writing for these terms: “medic” “text,” “layer,” “transparent” and “overlap.” I didn’t find anything. Maybe it was from the introduction to “Slow Learner?” I haven’t read that in a while.

—Quail

PS: My own memory is so unreliable that to this day I *insist* Grimace, the McDonald’s mascot, had FOUR arms when I was a kid. Everyone thinks I’m crazy, but one day I’ll find that commercial on YouTube…

From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
Date: Sunday, December 12, 2021 at 6:34 PM
To: Allen Ruch <quail at shipwrecklibrary.com>, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>, The Whole Sick Crew <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Pynchon’s Layers Statement

Skimming the interaction between Joe & Allen, I see Joe refer to a statement by Pynchon about his layers of writing:

Joe:  “As you know, because the story, I’m fairly certain, came from your [Quail’s] and web page, Pynchon once compared his writing to one of those medical texts with overlappable transparent layers.”


Then Joe lays out a 3 layer structure in Pynchon’s writing.  This caught my attention because just this week a guy  in the Reddit group ATD read (in which I’m participating) proposed his own 3 layer structure that seems nearly identical to what Joe proposed.  So this 3 layer idea seems to be floating around the internet now, and I’m curious about where it came from, and what Pynchon said about his own use of layers in his writing.


So, Big Quail, can you send a link, or just send the whole thing to this list?  I’m sorta shocked that I’d never seen it in all my years reading Pynchon. Clearly I didn’t dig through the Spermatikos Logos pages deep enough back in the day.