plots, victims and heroes--and dissent

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

recent threads in this theme:

>>This past weekend a friend told me that he found the characters of COL49
>>"cardboard," and after mulling it over, I couldn't help but agree with
>>him.  While I did get a multidimensional feel for the heroine of the novel,
>>any other characters were so two dimensional that I quickly forgot them.
>
>snip
>
>>Rob (aka splash)
>
>
>While I agree with you that some of TRP's characters are cardboard like,
>there are exceptions.  I've always felt that Roger Mexico and Jessica in GR
>are two of the more real charaters I've run across in fiction.  While the
>characters in Barth's The End of the Road are well realized, I've always
>had the feeling that Barth didn't really like anybody in the book.  (Of
>course it's been 25 years since I read it, so I might be talking through my
>hat).
>
>Some other characters that have always felt very real are Fausto Maijstral
>in V and several of the scetches of minor charaters in the early part of V
>(the first Stencil section).
>
>(another) Lindsay

------And so on and so on

I came into this thread  late and sketchily;  it's also late and I am sketchy as I write 
this, but having just finished teaching CL49 to an appreciative night class, and 
having discussed precisely this question of the --reality--of P's characters, I feel 
frustrated that, at least the above posts, and most others on this topic, are somehow 
faulting P for not creating traditional, mimetic, 3D characters.  But, really, why 
should he?  He's coming out of a completely different tradition.  How can you 
apply the standards of judgement of traditional--realism--to a non-realistic, 
non-mimetic aesthetic?  In CL49 the characters are their names, in a very real and 
even deep sense, although P is not seeking--depth--the way, say, Tolstoy does. 

 It's like faulting a Hammond organ because it doesn't give you the same tonal 
control as a grand piano.  It's failing to appreciate that cartoon characters have 
feelings too (I guess, even if they are kinda--flat--feelings). 

 Roger and Jessica stand out as exceptions precisely because Part 1 of GR is P 
showing us that he can do that sort of thing when he wants to (and who among us 
is unmoved by the pathos of their love story?).  That he generally does things 
differently w/ characters is not a fault; it's a choice.  It may not be your cuppa meat, 
but it's no lack in TRP revealed. 

Same thing goes for P's sense of plots.  Why should they follow classic trajectories 
when he is creating new paradigms (convolutions, knottings into, remember?) for 
the very idea of what --plotmaking--is in a narrative work.

Why do the strictures of realism die so hard?  

Please forgive me if I am repeating what others have said (but then, what choice do 
any of us have but to do that, all the time too).

john m