GRGR(6) - Ep. 15 Reader Dissonance.

[rj]

Gary, on Jill's expression of disdain towards Slothrop:

> Well, yeah, that was the question. But instead of assuming that P was
> trying to make him *non*-hollow, what do we do with the hollowness? Or,
> rather, what does the text do with it, or we with the text? 

I don't think Jill was saying that Slothrop isn't a "Fully Realized
Character". She was concerned that there "isn't much substance to his
character" (as David and Lars have been riffing on) in the sense that he
doesn't seem to have a backbone, or moral fibre, or any sense of
commitment in inter-personal relationships. At least, I think this is
what she was getting at. 

And, we do get lots and lots of insight into Slothrop's conscious
workings, the subconscious and unconscious workings, his "conditioning",
even into the furthest reaches of his inherited gene pool back with all
those ancestors and Puritanism. I mean, his psyche is what a (the)
substantial portion of the narrative's 'about', isn't it? An image (and
augmentation) of the depth of Slothrop's characterisation is in the
sifted layering of detritus atop his desk at ACHTUNG.(18)  The amount of
space devoted to the realization of Slothrop's character in the novel
is, as evidenced here, neurotic in its obsessiveness and archaeological
in its precision. _GR_ *is*, after all is said and done, "the story of
Slothrop", isn't it? Whatever else it may be.

As far as Jill's "dissonance" and intimations of literary
self-masturbatoriness go, I'm tempted (though gingerly) to go back to
one of Mark's (I think it was) opening sallies on the list -- which
earned him quite a severe caning, I might add -- about _GR_'s appeal (on
the surface at least) being pretty male-o-centric. Like B. Profane,
Slothrop stands for pure sensory gratification in the immediate present
-- true schlemihlhood, no heed for causality or consequence. This is a
quintessentially 'male' response, I think. I'm not sure that any
self-respecting woman *could* like/admire/sympathise with Slothrop and
his plight, let alone want to sleep with him! But the instinctive motion
of the narrative *is* to sympathise with him in some novelistic hero or
antihero sort of way. (It's interesting to compare the prominence of
female participants in the current DeLillo-l _Libra_ discussion and the
reverse ratio here -- is DeLillo's Oswald a more appealing (attractive?)
'victim'/antihero than Slothrop? I'd say yes, that seems to be the
intention.)

As well, the sort of dissonance Jill describes (*is* it your first
reading, Jill?) is what we're supposed to feel, isn't it? Like Michael
and Gary have pointed out, it's hundreds of pages in before you begin to
make any sense of anything, any connection, apart from a pocket of
poetry here and a hilarious "Mad Carnival" sequence there. But I think
that's the point, too. We're forced to hold off with our own conditioned
responses to literary narratives (about plot logic, heroes and villains,
truth and fiction, and so forth) and to historical 'fact', simply
because we can't get a secure foothold on *anything* in the text. We as
readers are "in the zone" where all the fences are down and the
possibilities are (supposedly) unlimited. Thus, we are forced to
reassess the assumptions which we bring to the text (about 'text', and
about the ostensible subjects of *this* text), and to consider why we
automatically identify with or like characters such as Slothrop and
Katje and Enzian in fiction (and life?) and not Blicero (or, elsewhere,
Brock Vond, say). What is the basis for our 'instinctive' moral
determination wrt these individuals? And what happens when you start
applying some of these questions to history? And life?

Further, I think Pynchon turns the tables on the traditional idea (in
Forster's words) of "flat" and "rounded" characters. It is the "rounded"
character of traditional fiction which is in fact a stereotype and
dilution of human personality to one or two or several coherent and
symbolically significant (and *consistently* so) characteristics,
traits, manners, accidents of dress, speech, habit, appetite etc.
Pynchon's characters (Joyce's too), by being so endlessly fickle and
fragmentary and self-obsessed and unpredictable, actually emulate human
psychology more truly, more fully, than those of Austen (except,
perhaps, Emma Woodhouse, of whom the author demurred that 'noone but
myself would much like'), Dickens, Hawthorne, Melville, George Eliot,
Flaubert, Dostoevsky, H. James.

As an example, Katje, in refusing to reveal her innermost motives to any
of her guys, and in actively repressing any connection between her
activities and the Jewish Holocaust, actually offers up a hugely-rounded
characterisation, of inscrutability and strength of mind in its instinct
for survival. And I think that it is such denials as Katje's which
Pynchon is able to pinpoint with all of the characters through his
narrative strategy of leeching pov into and out of characters'
consciousnesses at will. As readers, we get to see both what they're
thinking and what they do, but we keep having to ask 'how come?';
because they're all repressing stuff, and what they're thinking and
saying and doing doesn't actually fit with what is revealed and obvious.
They make errors (of judgement?) -- walking blithely into toilet bowls
and Candy Drills and Oven-games -- and generally fail or refuse to see
the wood for the trees. They can't, or won't, see themselves for what
they are, and these are the images of self they project, and which we
are then left to interpret.

I think that Pynchon gives us great insight into all of the major
characters' thought processes. More profitable than the standard and
somewhat pedestrian critical button-holing of _GR_ as Mennippean satire
-- character-as-symbolic cartoon (symbolic of what, though?) -- is Derek
Barker's notion of the 'Politics of Withdrawal' imho, a 'politics' of
consciousness as much as of conscience with which all of the characters,
and all humans, must ultimately contend.

best