More flatness

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

Mark Robberds writes:
"It seems that one of the dominant, if slightly
worn, paradigms of the text is being overlooked
here. I'm referring to that old fav the animate/
inanimate dualism.  On this matter you rilly can't
go past Alec McHoul and David Wills, Writing Pynchon,
and I'm not just plugging the homegrown product either.
To grossly simplify their argument: V deals with a
crisis in western thought, manifsted in the characters
Profane and Stencil. Profane fears that the inanimate
is encroaching upon humanist subjectivity, Stencil,
that random events are usurping linear history. In both
cases a  materially flat style, one which abandons
animation in favour of bare mechanics, would seem to
fit the thematic bill."

Good comments.  I would add that this crisis has (had?) been developed for
at least the last century--it's certainly articulated in Marx's earler 
writings, but for American Lit. purposes, the key theoretician (although
that's overusing the term) is Emerson.  "Things are in the saddle, and
ride Mankind," he proclaims.  Emerson, I think, in American lit. at least
marks the nexus of Puritanism, Romanticism and a reaction to an already-
nascent Modernism.  If a lot Emerson seems like warmed-over German
romanticism, he returned the favor by influencing Nietzsche.  And so we
come back to Pynchon, who is another nexus--of Puritanism, Modernism, and
Post-Modernism.

In regard to "flatness" itself, two thoughts:

1. As a matter of style, the Profane episodes tend to be "flatter" (a la
Nathaniel West?) than the Stencil episodes, which are more varied--since 
Stencil imagines the past, "Stencilizes," in different voices.  At times,
those voices are themselves deliberately flat--note the last section of
Chapter 3, which deliberately mimics the minimalist style of Robbe-Grillet.

2. Part of the confusion about flatness that has attended this discussion
has to do with the fact that "flatness" can mean many things--the flatness
of style mentioned above, a flatness of plotting (i.e., nothing "happens"--
another Modernist device: see Kafka, WAITING FOR GODOT, etc.); a flatness
of characterization, u.s.w.  The flatness of modern life is something that
Pynchon continually complains about--consider the lack of hiding places
in modern housing developments in "The Secret Integration," Dennis Flange's
fear of sticking out from the flat surface of the earth (or sea) in
"Lowlands," and so on.

That last makes an interesting comparison with a remark by Alfred Hitchcock.

Hitch said that the safest place he could be was a flat plain with a clear
sky, where he could see for miles around.  (And then he put that Cary Grant
in just such a setting in NORTH BY NORTHWEST, only to face death by
cropduster!)

I fear I'm wandering.  My apologies if little of this coheres.  (Or maybe
I'm just feeling very post-modern today :-)  )

--Don Larsson, Mankato State U., MN