Як і передмови, післямови, ці кілька оповідань - як вигуки в автобусі на ямах, коли заплутується язик, боляче закусується зубами - а в голові рояться думки. Так хочеться висловитись у цей несприятливий час - нетямущий учень! Приїхали!

A fun read for Pynchon fans. I really liked the introduction, where Pynchon reflects on the essays presented and himself as an early writer, as it provides a seemingly rare glimpse into his non-writer side.

Worth the read for Pynchon's introduction to the book and the story "Entropy." I think the best introduction to Pynchon is "The Crying of Lot 49" followed by "V." I'd say read this if you are a completionist. As for a starting point, it could work, but I still think his novels outpace any of his stories.

I read this because Gravity's Rainbow has claimed me as a victim five times now. I've yet to get past page 250. One day.

"The Secret Integration" makes for a strong finisher to this engaging collection--a sad but poignant denouement.

So, I gave up 300p. into Against the Day but Pynchon-mania is still on the agenda. I originally gifted this to my mum in French, she liked the preface but gave up on the first story. To be fair, “The Small Rain” is a bit rough (it’s his first published story), it takes place in the army (not a setting she likes) and the main character Levine seems a little bit too much like a self-insert. Which means that I kind of understand the author’s sentiment looking back on his youthful oeuvre:

“You may already know what a blow to the ego it can be to have to read over anything you wrote 20 years ago, even cancelled checks. My first reaction, rereading these stories, was oh my God, accompanied by physical symptoms we shouldn’t dwell upon. My second thought was about some kind of a wall-to-wall rewrite. These two impulses have given way to one of those episodes of middle-aged tranquility, in which I now pretend to have reached a level of clarity about the young writer I was back then.”

My beloved snarky Pynchon. Just for the sake of this 20p. introduction where Pynchon FINALLY talks about himself, getting the book is worth it for the average Pynchon fan. He spends most of it laminating his younger self, which is both very entertaining and insightful.

About his spy story (which I found wonderful, maybe the best of the bunch):

“Readers may also feel shorted because of how, more than anyone, the masterful John le Carré has upped the ante for the whole genre. Today we expect a complexity of plot and depth of character which are missing from my effort here. Most of it, happily, is chase scenes, for which I remain a dedicated sucker – it is one piece of puerility I am unable to let go of. May Road Runner cartoons never vanish from the video waves, is my attitude.”

Yes PLEASE more chase scenes!! We don’t need every book to be deep! Ah, all that wasted potential. Those puerile scenes from his later books are my favorite parts, the more cartoonish the better. Thinking in particular of The Duck in Mason & Dixon and the Austrian Archduke in Against the Day, top comedy, brings me to tears.

Some reflections also strike a chord with me because I am barely older than the Pynchon who wrote these stories, and just getting out of that “I know everything” age:

“Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything – or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. So as a corollary to writing about what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance, and the possibilities therein for ruining a good story.”

Onto the stories:

The Small Rain (3/5): liked the setting, the navy camaraderie. Didn’t think the hurricane was so necessary, or at least it did not make as big an impression as the first pages, even though it dealt with heavy topics. A nice metaphor originally about the army which also applies to social media bubbles:

“What I mean is something like a closed circuit. Everybody on the same frequency. And after a while you forget about the rest of the spectrum and start believing that this is the only frequency that counts or is real. While outside, all up and down the land, there are these wonderful colors and x-rays and ultraviolets going on.”

Low-lands (4/5): The kind of story whose setting is so memorable and bonkers, it stays with you for years. The house:

“Dennis and Cindy Flange had lived in this curious moss-thatched, almost organic mound for the seven years of their marriage and in this time Flange at least had come to feel attached to the place by an umbilical cord woven of lichen and sedge, furze and gorse; he called it his womb with a view and in their now infrequent moments of tenderness he would sing Cindy the Noel Coward song, half as an attempt to recall the first few months they were together, half as a love song for the house.”

And then the completely surreal garbage dump and its maze-like geography and subterranean inhabitants… really makes you think of his later books. It’s genius.

Entropy (3/5): The most famous one, which I had already read in an anthology. I liked the party atmosphere and the entropy metaphors (most of which probably went over my head), though I don’t understand why this one, specifically, is the most famous.

Under the Rose (5/5): So, so much fun. Spy story set in Egypt with mysterious players.

“Mildred was in Egypt, she soon informed Porpentine, to gather rock specimens, being daft for rocks in the same way Sir Alastair was for large and ancient pipe-organs. He had toured Germany the previous year, alienating the populations of various cathedral towns by recruiting small boys to toil away half-days at a clip keeping the bellows going: and then underpaying.”

And some deep thoughts:

“Fate, it occurred to him then, chooses weird agents. Moldweorp somehow could love and hate individually. The roles being, it seemed, reversed, Porpentine found it necessary to believe if one appointed oneself savior of humanity that perhaps one must love that humanity only in the abstract. For any descent to the personal level can make a purpose less pure. Whereas a disgust at individual human perversity might as easily avalanche into a rage for apocalypse.”

The Secret Integration (4/5): Pretty fun, unusual setting with all the protagonists being kids playing pranks. I couldn’t help but think that ubersmart Grover might be a younger Pynchon:

“Grover Snodd was a little older than Tim, and a boy genius. Within limits, anyway. A boy genius with flaws. His inventions, for example, didn’t always work. And last year he’d had this racket, doing everybody’s homework for them at a dime an assignment. But he’d given himself away too often. They knew somehow (they had a “curve,” according to Grover, that told them how well everybody was supposed to do) that it was him behind all the 90s and 100s kids started getting. “You can’t fight the law of averages,” Grover said, “you can’t fight the curve.” So they went to work earnestly on his parents to talk them into transferring him. Someplace. Anything.”

“Expert though he might be on every school topic from igneous rocks to Indian raids, Grover was still too dumb, as Tim saw it, to cover up how smart he was. Whenever he had a chance to show it, he’d always weaken. In a problem like somebody’s yard’s a triangle, find the area, Grover couldn’t resist bringing in a little trigonometry, which half the class couldn’t even pronounce, or calculus, a word they saw from time to time in the outer-space comics and was only a word.”

And also: ““Ultraviolet fluorescence,” Grover said, having obvious fun with the words.” Having fun with words, huh, very suspicious!

Part of what I love in these stories (and in Pynchon’s books in general) is how much he relies on spoken language for a kind of realistic, unpretentious style. I’m sure other writers must do it too, but I’ve never found anyone so successful at it. He briefly talks about it in the introduction:

“By the time I wrote “The Secret Integration” I was embarked on this phase of the business. I had published a novel and thought I knew a thing or two, but for the first time I believe I was also beginning to shut up and listen to the American voices around me, even to shift my eyes away from printed sources and take a look at American nonverbal reality.”

31. Slow Learner : Early Stories by Thomas Pynchon
published: 1984 - stories originally published 1959, 1960, 1961 & 1964
format: 193 page paperback
acquired: March 13
read: May 30 - Jun 4
rating: 4 stars

A much nicer reading experience than I expected. The self-deprecating introduction really sets the tone, downplaying expectations and welcoming the reader to just relax a bit and enjoy the flawed stories. These five stories include the first four stories Pynchon published. They were apparently no minor item, as they got noticed and put Pynchon on the map of a small literary crowd before his first book came out.

The introduction alone was worth the book. Pynchon is notoriously reclusive, but his introduction is very open. He complains about how amateur these works are and expresses regret over the things he forced into these stories to try to make them more literary. This self-criticism is somehow both a bit in mock and very sincere. It's also spot on, interesting, and charming.

The Small Rain 1959
A low level army tech takes a minor roll in hurricane response. The hurricane was unexpected, deadly, and actually happened. The response becomes body recovery. This was my favorite story as it works on a simple level - an unusual and casual, almost accidental confrontation with death. It just manages to become more than it is.

Low-Lands 1960
A man's wife kicks him out of the house. He spends a night in a garbage dump with the overseer. There is a lot of Greek mythology references and a element of horror. Curious.

Entropy 1960
Actually a kind of cool story that involves a wacky party and the odd young couple one floor below, pondering entropy. But, if I can pretend to give analysis, and this kind of story will encourage you to pretend to do the same, the point seems to be his use of the word entropy in a story context - both giving new meaning to and coloring the entire story. It's one of those interesting ideas I find hard to grasp of all at once. The wild parties become something that cannot hold, if you like. They expend more than what can be replaced. And they become directional, leading toward an end, without ever touching on this directly. Not sure I have it right, or close, but it makes sense to me. It also really defines the sense of everything in V. and Gravity's Rainbow - for him it's a foundational concept.

"The cosmologists had predicted an eventual heat-death for the universe (something like Limbo: form and motion abolished, heat-energy identical at every point in it); the meteorologists, day-to-day, staved it off by contradicting with a reassuring array of varied temperatures.

But for three days now, despite the changeful weather, the mercury had stayed at 37 degrees Fahrenheit."

Under the Rose 1961
A take on the tricky world of Fin de siècle espionage, where principals seems to play an important, but hard to define roll. This becomes a chapter in V., with some differences. I didn't like it in V. and I didn't like it any better as a standalone. I found it a snobbish effort.

The Secret Integration 1964
This story actually post-dates V.. The story is, in a nutshell, boys behaving badly. But Pynchon adds and works on a complicated racial element. The boys "integrate" themselves with an imaginary black boy, patting themselves on the back for their forwardness, until the town's reality weighs in too heavily. It's both great and not, depending on how you look at it, and there are many different ways. I thought the racial element was forced.

I had already read the secret integration beforehand which was amazing however as Pynchon states himself in the introduction these are simply mediocre. Interesting but don’t have the same spark as his other works

En verdad es un lento aprendizaje la escritura de estos cuentos y también su lectura.

El prólogo es un maravilla. El autor recorre cada uno de sus relatos y los años de formación y escritura de cada uno. Lo cual es también un recorrido culturales los Estados Unidos después de la segunda mitad del siglo. Pynchon es generoso y destruye con bastante acierto sus cuentos y las fallas de los narradores.

Creo que la estructura de los relatos es el de un crescendo de maestría y uso de los artificios.

El primero está bueno pero podría ser un cuento de Hemingway.

El segundo es medio aburrido pero tiene una linda estructura y una fuga a lo Pynchon.

El tercero, Entropía, hace ese uso de transpolar una idea técnica a la narración. Yo no tenía idea de que es era la entropia... ahora se que no es solo la tendencia al caos. Se despliega en todas las estructuras del relato.

“Aplicado a un sistema dinámico, la entropía es la medida que explica por qué, si ponemos un objeto caliente junto a uno frío, el frío se calienta y el caliente se enfría”.

El cuarto es caótico. No se entiende nada a propósito pero la construcción general del relato y la trama son seductoras. El artificio, sub rosa, también. Acá ya está como el germen de Pynchon (personajes simples en entramados más grandes que la realidad o algo así). Yo leí La subasta hace mucho y me costó horrores. De estos cuentos entendí mucho más. Igual siento que el autor necesita espacio para echar esas raíces que tanto le gustan a la gente. En algún momento me lanzaré un ladrillo a la cara.

El último la integración secreta fue el mejor. Es como un relato de King de esos de verano pero con una vuelta de tuerca y una situación con un alcoholico a lo Carver. Muy bueno.

Me cansé de contar de qué se tratan.

This one's probably for the hardcore, although with the caveat that aren't too many casual Pynchon fans, unless you're that one person who thinks he should have started and stopped with "Vineland" (and yes, I'm aware there's a good chance it is someone's favorite). A writer of large difficult books who has close to zero media presence but isn't angrily aggressive about it (he's lent his voice to "The Simpsons" at least once, so its clear he has some sense of humor) he's managed to stay fairly anonymous by basically just not appearing anywhere. The most recent verifiable photographs of him are from the 1950s and while he's done more PR for his books in recent years (relatively speaking, since almost anything is more than zero) he's not about to hit the talk show circuit to chat it up.

Its worked out well for him over the decades. Now in his eighties, there is a very good chance he could pass you on the street and you wouldn't know who he was (it seems reasonably likely that he's lived in Manhattan for a while) although most of the authors I like would fall into that category. But he's also managed to win the National Book Award once (for "Gravity's Rainbow"), almost the Pulitzer for Fiction (also for "Gravity's Rainbow"), seen one book made into a movie ("Inherent Vice") and has influenced quite a few writers, although the results can sometimes be mixed (um, Neal Stephenson . . . although he's gotten better!)

And while its easy enough as a reader to respect his privacy, you can't but sometimes be a little curious about the guy. With so little known about him almost any nugget of info that dispels the cloud of mystery is fascinating in itself, like collecting puzzle pieces scattered all over the country, trying to put them together despite having no idea what the picture is even supposed to look like.

Which is why this collection is so surprising. Not because it exists . . . by the mid-eighties when this was published he was probably just well-known enough to justify it and with his novels coming out very infrequently (his next novel, "Vineland" wouldn't come out until 1990, seventeen years after "Gravity's Rainbow") it was no doubt worth putting out some kind of stop-gap collection just to see if the audience was still out there. It's not even that big of a collection . . . collecting only five stories that he wrote mostly before his first published novel (for completists there's one other story that for some reason didn't make this collection . . . go track down "Epoch" Vol 9 #4!) it gives fans a chance to get a peek at his more embryonic state when he wasn't exactly Thomas Pynchon in all caps, but some random writer publishing off-kilter short stories in various magazines. So for that reason alone there's some value in it.

But what puts this over the top is that Pynchon himself writes the introduction to the collection. And not in a "Here's stories I wrote when I was young, hope you enjoy them despite me not knowing what I was doing" fashion but a legitimate twenty plus page preface where he dissects each story at decent length and talks about his life to a lesser extent. Its remarkably candid and weirdly chatty from someone who's gone to great lengths to avoid having any sort of presence beyond sort of blending into the background of the general public. What prompted it I have no idea (its not like he's prone to commenting) but its an unexpected bonus and definitely worth a read if you're interested in how he looks at writing in general.

The stories themselves are, as Pynchon himself says (repeatedly), the work of someone who is just getting started. Now considering that the someone just getting started would eventually turn into a person who wrote at least one book that regularly makes "Best of Twentieth Century Novels" lists you hope that the stories would be better than average, even if it'll be clear that wasn't a genius right out of the gate.

For the most part that's a fair assessment. When you only have five chances to wow people its hard to forgive even one bad story, even if the subtitle of the collection as "Early stories" feels like its setting expectations just a bit lower (its probably also there to prevent people from assuming its new material, considering it had been a decade since his last novel at that point) . . . but fortunately all of them are at least readable, with the end result that its somewhat reassuring that Pynchon was human after all and didn't produce five masterpieces right out of the starting gate.


We get the so-so one out of the way fast. Published while he was still in college, "The Small Rain" draws upon the experience of the friend of his who served in the Army (Pynchon himself was in the Navy). It details the experience of an soldier stationed in the New Orleans area who has to help clean up an island that was hit by a hurricane. Its an interesting story, marked by dialogue that sounds like everyone is being written by an English major while ending a bit less than neatly, almost like we're in a truncated version of someone's life. Despite the setting being fairly authentic what's striking is how normal this seems. The dizzying cascades of prose and odd angles are nowhere to be found here, not even within sniffing distance. Read in a vacuum, its okay.

"Low-lands" gets us into weirder territory, even if its clear that Pynchon is still figuring out how to harness the weirdness to tie into his themes. Characters start to have more strangely evocative names, like Pig Bodine and Rocco Squarcione and there's a decent amount of quirky bonding as lawyer Dennis Flange hangs out in a dump with the aforementioned Pig Bodine and his garbage man after his wife insists they get out of her sight. This leads to a slight sense of unreality just as the ending comes around and things get a bit surreal. Again, its interesting but doesn't hit with much weight . . . at times it seems like Pynchon is circling what he wants to say without necessarily quite knowing how to nail it.

By the time we get to "Entropy" its clear we're starting to get somewhere and it actually becomes kind of fun watching him improve and refine from story to story, picking up on what he's done before and taking it a little bit further. This one starts to touch on topics that will become near and dear to him later, specifically the title concept, centering around a wild lease breaking party that seems to have everything going on at once. Here he starts to cram in wacky events and whatever scientific theories he's interested in so that everything feels in a constant state of controlled disarray, a sky machine falling apart one piece of its misshapen contraption at a time. It’s the world shoved into a box and then turned up a few notches, a soup of sights and sounds where once in a while coherent scenes emerge from the murk before dissolving again, with a final scene that for once has a bit of weight to it, an act and image frozen into itself, not quite striking the heart but a colder place next to it that you had forgotten existed.

Then we have "Under the Rose". This one feels like a leap, even if Pynchon didn't think he was quite there yet. Two British spies, Porpentine and Goodfellow, are hanging out into Egypt. Its the years before WWI, when Europe was at least sort of pretending that countries could still be civil to each other. The two of them are trying to foil a plot by their arch-nemesis Moldweorp, but they're not even sure what the plot is. This one feels like its got a bit of the secret world in it, the sense of the action that goes on behind the scenes where the people who are behind the scenes seem to believe that there are engines that lurk behind even them. This one is fast paced and shot through with a strange aching melancholy, as if the story is aware what year it is and what's coming and it soaks into all the car chases and spy hijinks, like what they're doing now is a game that in a decade or two is just going to be a fond memory of children playing when things start to get really serious. It’s a mood he hasn't hit before in the collection (although it’s a note he would hit harder in the novels, especially "Against the Day") and he pulls it off with surprising effectiveness, catching that note when your enemies have grasped the changing times earlier than you have and almost start feeling sorry for you. It finishes with the realization that the world can't be avoided and if it feels a bit too on the nose (something that marks a lot of these stories, he hasn't mastered a certain kind of heartstopping ambiguity yet) it still feels like he's capturing something that lurked just outside the stories previously.

Which brings us to "The Secret Integration". The only one published after he published his first novel (and probably his highest profile story, appearing in "The Saturday Evening Post") it also feels the most natural, as if he's not struggling anymore but has become confident in what he can skills with his skills at that particular moment. It features kids and even if its not autobiographical it comes the closest to being pulled, maybe not from strict memory, but from the memory of what memory was like. A group of kids have organized themselves into a secret club that plans elaborate pranks (they often discuss how to disrupt a PTA meeting) and most of the story is focused on how they tumble through their world, with all the legends and myths that come with being children, fantastical as they might be. In the background, as if being behind an erected sheet and silhouetted darkly, the world is lurking, as their parents seem to be bent on harassing any African-American family that tries to move into the neighborhood.

What's amazing about this one is how he captures the simultaneously sense of real and unreal that comes with being a child, where weird impossible things can be true and very much possible and the world itself is refracted into some new language. They react as serious children do, both unserious and completely committed (a centerpiece of the story is a couple of the kids, one of whom has been through AA, sitting with someone in a hotel who's trying not to drink and who also can't believe that the only person available to help him is a child), perceptive but maybe not perceiving everything completely, filtering it through their own logic. In its own way it captures the feeling of being a child through the eyes of a child (the closest comparison I can think of is Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life", although this didn't feel as, um, portentiously universal?). It has a strange bouncy disappointment to it, as if everything has already been corrupted and they're obliviously holding it off for just one more day, or lying to themselves as to why they're doing it. About the only off note is the state of one of their friends, which again feels a bit too obvious in making the themes clear (he does a better job sticking with the misunderstood calculus metaphor of the title) but by that point the story feels like it could ride off forever and do it all again the next day.

And that's all of them. Going through all five, I think its clear that Pynchon was never going to be a master of the short story form. His power derives from being able to stretch out at great length (unless it’s the feverish compression of "The Crying of Lot 49", which he only tried to pull off once) and let all the sentences and themes and situations accumulate until its nearly overwhelming. So none of these are perfect but he was also still very new at this. Maybe if he decided to focus purely on short stories he might have been able to pack all he was trying to do in a very small space. But I prefer him expansive, frankly, and while these are good they're not going to win him too many new converts as literally nothing else he's written are anything like these. So maybe they're a good bite-sized introduction for the cautious before diving into the deeper waters. For the rest of us, though, these are a pleasant side trip. The real stuff is elsewhere.

"Slow Learner" provides an interesting look at Thomas Pynchon's early writings, in this case a collection of five short stories that span from 1959 to 1964. Perhaps the highlight of the tome is the introduction by Pynchon himself. He gives some interesting insight into his thought process and a glimpse into his thoughts of these early and rough works. While the stories are flawed and fall short of the Pynchon's later and more extended works, the last one is actually pretty interesting and there are glimpses throughout the book of where his writing was going to eventually gravitate towards. If you are Pynchon fan, you are certainly going to want read this, but only for the experience of seeing the pangs of his early writing and knowing that these would eventually evolve and grow into his brilliant literary style and works.

The short story "Under the Rose" reappears in altered form as Chapter Three of V.. Published the same year, the two versions make for an interesting comparison of how an author can switch points of view and character portrayal with the same material.

The short story "The Secret Integration" is the most accessible and un-Pynchonlike. To be honest, it's my favorite of this collection.

Un escritor misterioso, invisible, escurridizo; un mito que, similar a Pie Grande, no ha dejado rastro de su paso biográfico más que un puñado de fotografías y registros sobrevivientes a su acto frenético de borrarlos. Así es Thomas Pynchon, un surreal y crítico retratista de la sociedad norteamericana –con sus excesos y dislates–. Se dice fue alumno de Nabókov, elogiado por Harold Bloom y creador de una singular huella: historias truculentas, nombres peculiares, personajes caricaturescos, contenido psicológico, elementos de la ciencia. Se lo reconoce por su labor novelística, que llega a picos absolutos en La subasta del lote 49 (1966), El arco iris de gravedad (1973) y Vineland (1990), sin embargo, la semilla de su estilo y su labor más promiscua se encuentra en sus cuentos; escritos entre 1958-1964 y reunidos en el volumen de bello y acertado título, Un lento aprendizaje (1984).

En el prólogo del cuentario el autor advierte que son creaciones verdes, tempraneras y con ciertas torpezas de un escritor en formación. Nada desechables, pues además de contar con su propia calidad y visos de lo que vendrá, sirvieron como laboratorio y sirven para reflexionar sobre el joven que escribe y el lento proceso de aprendizaje del prosista. Pynchon realiza un acto de honestidad total al analizar estas primeras producciones, con la finalidad de que otros no caigan en los mismos errores y domeñen los caballos desbocados presentes en los escritos noveles. Que el escritor novato aprenda del maestro quien ejemplifica con su propia producción. Nostalgia de lo que fue, confesión de los cambios y sapiencia adquirida.

De lo dicho por Pynchon en el prólogo, he rastreado un decálogo implícito con doce recomendaciones que nacen del análisis de sus cuentos; el ejercicio del lector se complementa al examinar cada uno centrándose en aquellos puntos flacos. A continuación el decálogo:

De ‘Lluvia ligera’ (marzo de 1959). Un amigo le proporcionó la anécdota y los detalles de la historia. Uno de los objetivos buscados por el autor fue mostrar las verticalidades de las clases sociales; tomó como base las divisiones sociales en el ámbito militar.

Nathan “Culón” Levine, militar fofo, cómodo, perteneciente al batallón de transmisiones 131, en Fort Roach, Louisiana, es enviado a Lake Charles porque, al parecer, una tormenta afectó las líneas de transmisión y necesitaban técnicos. Levine no deseaba hacer el trabajo pues le habían concedido un permiso y no quería perder ni un minuto del mismo. Junto con su compañero Picnic se enteraron que un huracán había devastado Creole. Instalados en la base de operaciones del ejército en el campus del colegio universitario McNeese, Levine empieza a cuestionar su hasta ese momento cómoda y cotidiana vida militar. El ambiente en el campus, el olor putrefacto de los cadáveres transportados, un encuentro sexual con Botoncito de oro –similar a la trama de la novela que Levine lee: La chica del pantano–, complementan la historia. De vuelta a Roach, debido al temporal lluvioso se menciona a T. S. Elliot y Hemingway; mientras que a uno le gusta la lluvia, el otro la detesta.

1. Al pensar que el problema de un personaje no es tan real o interesante, se trata de volverlo literario. Pynchon pone como ejemplo la introducción de imágenes de lluvia y referencias a La tierra baldía y Adiós a las armas.
2. Cuando se busca emular un acento desconocido para el autor, se puede llegar a estropear el ritmo de los diálogos. “Mi error consiste en tratar de pavonearme de mi oído antes de tenerlo”.
3. Al tratar temas abstractos o esenciales como la muerte, se debe tomar en cuenta la verosimilitud en los personajes; estos podrían parecer meros adolescentes ante un tema profundo.
4. Evitar la autocensura y nerviosismo en temas tabúes. No permitir que la sociedad conservadora y represora inhiba la expresión y creatividad. Pynchon menciona los problemas acaecidos en su época por obras aparecidas, tales como Aullido de Allen Ginsberg, Lolita de Vladimir Nabókov y Trópico de Cáncer de Henry Miller.

De ‘Tierras bajas’ (marzo de 1960). Ambientado en su tierra natal. La anécdota provino de un camarada artillero de la marina y su luna de miel.

Como si se tratase de toda la serie de sueños que se producen al ir a dormir. Dennis Flange y su esposa Cindy viven en una casa encaramada sobre un acantilado. Flange trata de sobrellevar algunos problemas existenciales con ayuda de su psicoanalista, Jerónimo Díaz –de métodos poco ortodoxos–, y su afición por el mar. Mar como una mujer, mar como tierra compacta y médium de historias.

Cindy siente aversión por los amigos de su esposo (el basurero Rocco y “Cerdo” Bodine), los ve como animales y malas influencias. Bodine fue quien lo secuestró durante su luna de miel. Al echarlos de la casa se dirigen a un vertedero municipal. En ese lugar Flange es atraído por la voz de una muchacha a un asentamiento gitano escondido entre la basura. Una vieja llamada Violeta ha predicho que un anglo se convertirá en el marido de la muchacha.

5.No truncar el crecimiento de los personajes, permitir que resuelvan sus problemas y tengan un flujo normal de vida. Los valores adolescentes pueden dañar a un personaje.

De ‘Entropía’ (primavera de 1960). Cuento derivado de los trabajos científicos The Human Use of Human Beings de Norbert Wiener y The Education de Henry Adams. Intento de reflejar la vida durante los años cincuenta, se aproxima a los relatos de la Generación beat.

Multitud de personajes, dos historias, un cuento. “Albóndiga” Mulligan organiza una fiesta para celebrar la ruptura de su contrato de arrendamiento: amigos, alcohol, música, resaca, peleas de pareja, miembros de la marina, jazz. La fiesta se extiende tres días, “Albóndiga” trata de que no se convierta en un caos. Callisto y Aubade viven dentro de un ecosistema con sus pájaros. A Callisto le interesa la termodinámica, está interesado en la apocalíptica muerte del universo a causa del calor.
A diario revisa la temperatura ambiental. Entropía en su vida, en la sociedad: caos y orden, trabajo y energía.

6. No pecar de error de procedimiento: “es erróneo comenzar con un tema, símbolo u otro agente unificador, y luego intentar que los personajes y acontecimientos se le adapten a la fuerza.” El error de procedimiento puede provocar un abandono de los personajes y una pérdida de convencimiento.
7. No perder demasiado tiempo en la búsqueda de palabras intrincadas sin saber el significado de las mismas, pues el relato puede quedar muy recargado. Pynchon cae al utilizar la palabra “zarcillo”, tomada de T. S. Elliot (en el inglés original es otra palabra), y al utilizar la expresión “grippe espagnole”, vista en la cubierta de un disco de Stravinsky; utiliza la expresión pensando que expresaba una mal espiritual posterior a la Primera Guerra Mundial, cuando en verdad denota una epidemia de gripe.
8. Creernos sabedores de todo y volvernos desconocedores del alcance y estructura de nuestra ignorancia. Escribir sobre lo que en verdad conocemos, familiarizarnos con nuestra ignorancia; sin esa familiaridad se estropea un relato. No se debe engañar al lector por inventos o por pereza, hay que corroborar la información compartida.
9. No caer en el robo o derivación literaria. Si bien no hay nada original en el mundo, se suele tomar prestado sin agregar una nota de reconocimiento o agradecimiento al autor original.

De ‘Bajo la rosa’ (mayo de 1961). Nouvelle influenciada por el surrealismo; Pynchon combina “elementos estructurales” para producir “efectos ilógicos y sorprendentes”. Relato juvenil que acabó por ser incorporado en la novela V. de 1963.

El juego de espías se desarrolla en la Libia de 1898, Egipto y sus alrededores. Porpentine (del inglés tradicional, “puerco espín”) y Moldweorp (del teutónico antiguo, “topo”) son viejos conocidos y rivales. Porpentine, junto con su socio Goodfellow, están en medio de un posible conflicto internacional y posible Armagedón. Conflicto entre Francia e Inglaterra por la intervención en el Nilo y el apoderamiento de África. Porpentine trabaja para Inglaterra y Moldweorp para Alemania. El hombre clave en el asunto es Lord Cromer, cónsul británico en El Cairo, diplomático cauto que puede evitar una guerra. ¿Moldweorp trama un asesinato? Paralelo surge un idilio entre Victoria Wren y Goodfellow; ella estaba relacionada antes con Bongo-Shaftsbury (arqueólogo), quien, junto con Lepsius se revelan como los perseguidores de Porpentine. El juego de espías termina con un Moldweorp ganador; este engaña a Porpentine con un falso atentado en el teatro, luego de un escape lo embosca y asesina. Porpentine pide la libertad de Goodfellow y Victoria. Años más tarde Goodfellow deberá evitar un nuevo Armagedón (advenimiento de la Bomba) con el asesinato del archiduque Francisco Fernando.

10. Es necesario dotar de mayor profundidad a los personajes, así no se generan estereotipos o inautenticidades. Similar a lo sucedido en ‘Entropía’, Pynchon, al imitar un hablado desconocido, no logra los matices del inglés británico.

De ‘La integración secreta’ (diciembre de 1964). Otra nouvelle, ambientada en su ciudad natal. El autor quiso escribir sobre el paisaje y sus experiencias infantiles; al situarse en un espacio casi en blanco, sin mucha historia, impuso una topografía más complicada: trasladó la trama a los Berkshires (al nunca haber puesto un pie en dicho lugar, tuvo que consultar una guía regional). Pynchon, al pensar que la vida de un escritor no tiene que ver con su ficción y al no gustarle “demasiado” lo autobiográfico, experimentó en este cuento y en ‘Lluvia ligera’.

Época lluviosa en los Berkshires, contexto de fuerte discriminación racial. Se nos presenta un grupo de jóvenes bromistas, denominados la Junta Interna: Grover Snodd, el líder superdotado; Tim Santora, el amigo-escudero; Carl Barrington, afroamericano y Étienne Cherdlu, gordo y mayor bromista. El grupo, cada año, planifican una gran broma codificada como operación Espartaco cuya finalidad es generar inseguridad y descontento en la gente. Los integrantes se reúnen para debatir sobre los avances y logística inherentes al asunto; su escondite secreto está ubicado en la finca abandonada del rey Yrjö.

El tema racial se lo aborda con mayor detenimiento cuando Tim y su amigo Hogan –de la doble A– visitan a Carl McAfee, músico afro. Intercambian historias mientras tratan de distraerlo de los efectos de la abstinencia. Al producirse un altercado en el hotel por una botella de licor se lo llevan detenido. La segunda mención se da mediante un feedback que describe la llegada de los Barrington al barrio, el acoso de los vecinos y como se hicieron amigos de Carl Barrington.

11. No caer en el ansia del viajero. No se debe desplazar, si no es requerida, la experiencia personal a otros entornos; sobre todo desconocidos. Se pueden cometer inautenticidades.
12. Es aconsejable, de vez en cuando, callar y escuchar las voces ajenas, alzar la vista de las “fuentes impresas” y empaparse del lenguaje de la gente común.