Paranoia: What is a character?

[Terrance]

Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> I think I now see the approach Paul is attempting and see the advantages. 

I too see. Excellent! And he is doing a nice job here for us and I
certainly appreciate it. My favorite Pynchon "character" is Carl
Barrington. Now it may not make a lot of sense to talk a about an
imaginary boy assembled like a robot from junkyard parts and Wishes and
dreams and pre-Freudian Return, but being perhaps a bit younger than you
Paul, sometimes I can't help it. Of course, this could also be due to my
having read too much Dickens and Swift (not Tom Swift) as a boy or my my
having been raised in a church literally at the bottom of Bolingbroke's
dump.    

"One reason Humans remain young so long, compar'd with other Creatures,
is that the young are useful in many ways, among them in providing
daily, by way of the evil Creatures and Slaughter they love, a Denial of
Mortality clamorous enough to allow their Elders release, if only for
moments in time, from its Claims upon Attention." MD.37

"Look, for example, at Victor's account of how he assembles and animates
his creature. He must, of course, be a little vague about the details,
but we're left with a procedure that seems to include surgery,
electricity (though nothing like Whale's galvanic extravaganzas),
chemistry, even, from dark hints about Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus,
the still recently discredited form of magic known as alchemy. What is
clear, though, despite the commonly depicted Bolt Through the Neck, is
that neither the method nor the creature that results is mechanical."

"This is one of several interesting similarities between "Frankenstein"
and an earlier tale of the Bad and Big, "The Castle of Otranto" (1765),
by Horace Walpole, usually regarded as the first Gothic novel. For one
thing, both authors, in presenting their books to the public, used
voices not their own. Mary Shelley's preface was written by her husband,
Percy, who was pretending to be her. Not till 15 years later did she
write an introduction to "Frankenstein" in her own voice. Walpole, on
the other hand, gave his book an entire made-up publishing history,
claiming it was a translation from medieval Italian. Only in his preface
to the second edition did he admit authorship." 

"The novels are also of strikingly similar nocturnal origin: both
resulted from episodes of lucid dreaming. Mary Shelley, that ghost-story
summer in Geneva, trying to get to sleep one midnight, suddenly beheld
the creature being brought to life, the images arising in her mind "with
a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie." Walpole had been
awakened from a dream, "of which, all I could remember was, that I had
thought myself in an ancient castle... and that on the uppermost
bannister of a great stair-case I saw a gigantic hand in armour."


"In Walpole's novel, this hand shows up as the hand of Alfonso the Good,
former Prince of Otranto and, despite his epithet, the castle's resident
Badass. Alfonso, like Frankenstein's creature, is assembled from pieces
-- sable-plumed helmet, foot, leg, sword, all of them, like the hand,
quite oversized -- which fall from the sky or just materialize here and
there about the castle grounds, relentless as Freud's slow return of the
repressed. The activating agencies, again like those in "Frankenstein,"
are non-mechanical. The final assembly of "the form of Alfonso, dilated
to an immense magnitude," is achieved through supernatural means: a
family curse, and the
intercession of Otranto's patron saint."

The craze for Gothic fiction after "The Castle of Otranto" was grounded,
I suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythic time
which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. I ways more and less
literal, folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all
kinds of things had been possible which were no longer so. 



But if we do insist upon fictional violations of the laws of nature --
of space, time,
thermodynamics, and the big one, mortality itself -- then we risk being
judged by the literary mainstream as Insufficiently Serious. 


Mortality, Morality, and soap. 
Morality, Mortality and soap.
I'm a dope to deny that elephants fly.
That children have secrets they've pulled from the sky.
That dreams are not wishes come true. 
But sometimes I deny
all that money can buy
and my dish runs away with my spoon. 

Tea!
oh, it's time for tea

early in the morning when the kettles a boil
I could swear that its singing cod liver oil
oh doctor oh doctor
oh dear dr. john
your cod liver oil is so pure and so strong
that I swear by me life
I'm goin down in the soil
if me wife don't stop drinkin your cod liver oil

Thanks Paul and Paul