GRGR(6) - Ep. 15 Reader Dissonance.

[Paul Mackin]

rj in a  careful and literate way has (among other topics addressed)
described a sense in which Slothrop, Katje, Enzian, Blicero (others too I
suppose) are indeed well-developed characters. I wouldn't attempt to
question any of the points or claim that the respective psyches are not
brimming over with  fascinating  bits of heredity, conditionings, and
repressions--yes they're what the story is about. What I refuse to do
however is acknowledge  that there is any good reason why I should be
likely to want to make moral judgements of anyone based on this kind of
mental detail alone (if that's what rj is implying). Rather I find that
the only reaction possible is  acceptance of each of these magnificent
creations as works of art, infinitely intriguing on this occasion or that,
but somehow not adding up to likable or dislikable characters. The art is
good. The people are not quite people.  By the way, I disagree that
Slothrop is a very good exemplar for pure sensory appetite for the simple
reason that his pursuit of sex with all females in the vicinity is so
utterly and comically mechanical.  I just don't sense desire in the way
I'm used to sensing it. I know there's something somehow akin to desire
conditioned-in but that's not the same thing. I'm being conventional I
know and the point rj makes is that P is NOT being conventional, but still
and all we're talking about reactions and that's how this whole discussion
started.

			P.


On Sun, 18 Jul 1999, rj wrote:

> 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
>