Paranoia: What is a character?

[Paul Mackin]

I think I now see the approach Paul is attempting and see the advantages. I
get bothered by treating characters in a novel as more than somewhat
specialized parts of the fictional landscape including when in a sense the
characters ARE real people as in M&D. (of course there IS the fact we can
emphathize with even fictional human beings but . . . .) Thinking back to
some past discussions we've had about GR over whether Slothrup, Pointsman,
Roger, or especially Weissmann/Blicero were acting morally or immorally.
Never seemed to make any sense put in quite those terms.

        P.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Nightingale" <paulngale at supanet.com>
To: "'Terrance'" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>; <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2001 3:12 AM
Subject: MDMD: Paranoia: What is a character?


> Terrance,
>
> I find it difficult to regard characters in quite that way; 'they' are
> elements in a fictional landscape, pretty much as descriptions of the
> setting. Obviously, fictional elements known as - to pluck a name at
> random - Mason or Dixon serve a purpose that we wouldn't (probably)
> associate with non-human elements (where 'human' and 'non-human' become
> agreeable fictions: think of Kafka's wonderful mole-narrator, or whatever
it
> is, in "The Burrow" or Robbe-Grillet's anthropomorphism).
>
> So what purpose is served by saying a character is paranoid? They might
> manifest, in the writing, aspects of paranoia; which is to say the author
> has ascribed to them the appropriate symptoms. If Slothrop were a 'real
> person' (I'm reliably informed they do exist, somewhere) I might be
> concerned in anticipation of his likely behaviour; I might wish to avoid
him
> altogether, merely offering him the good advice to go and seek treatment
(I
> hope that doesn't sound unsympathetic, I suspect I really wouldn't want to
> hold his hand). However, on the page, he remains a wonderful creation, one
> of the great heroes of contemporary fiction. I keep coming back to
paranoia,
> as a fictional device, as Pynchon's way of ordering a narrative.
>
> Certainly, I find this a better approach to understanding Chapter 5 in M&D
> and I've tried to answer my own question: what is the function of paranoia
> in the writing? Earlier I quoted (part of) Freud's discussion of paranoia
in
> Civilisation and its Discontents: in context, it is pretty clear that he
is
> using it as a vehicle for his thoughts on contemporary society. Whether or
> not he is trustworthy as a scientist (as in: "Well, I think Jung got it
> right on dreams") is of less interest to me; I prefer to think of him as a
> producer of fictions (which doesn't mean I think he was 'lying'). In M&D,
I
> think it interesting that paranoia, the emergence of a plot that seeks to
> manipulate Mason/Dixon, appears in Ch5, at the very moment when they, and
> we, might speculate about this being the end of their adventure before it
> has really begun. For Freud, one of the manifestations of paranoia was
> precisely the reordering of events to suit the individual's highly
> subjective outlook: they will "try to re-create the world, to build up in
> its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are
eliminated
> and replaced by others that are in conformity with one's own wishes". For
> Mason/Dixon, being removed from the 'stage of history' by a messy death at
> sea would be "unbearable". Hence they will not dream of the battle; which
> means they will not know if they've dreamed of it, the dream having been
> repressed/lost to consciousness. they will prefer to think of the moment
> they become, in the writing of the letter, the target of others' plotting.
> What really happened (shitting themselves with fear) is replaced by a text
> to be interpreted. And we shouldn't forget that all of this comes to us
> courtesy of Cherrycoke: if Mason/Dixon are out of business, what are his
> prospects?
>
>
>
>