Paranoia: What is a character?

[Paul Nightingale]

Thankyou Paul and Terrance. Firstly I'd hate to give the impression I think
of fiction as just words, no different from a shopping list (although that
might depend on where you do your shopping). We do empathise with fictional
characters; that is to say, we do respond emotionally, we have to, otherwise
there is no point reading. Elitist approaches to the appreciation of
literature have always prioritised an intellectual response as one way of
saying only a few people are qualified to judge. The study of literature (in
this country anyway, ie Britain) is based on this Leavisite approach. The
rest, the masses, are easily swayed by trashy writing. Personally, I cannot
consider an intellectual response that isn't informed by some kind of
emotional investment in what happens to characters.

Secondly, Terrance, you've started me thinking about the Gothic. Shelley and
Walpole et al. Attempts to say the unsayable, pre-Freudian takes on the
unconscious. Certainly desire, but also class conflict, which Pynchon has
weaved in-&-out of his narrative in the opening chapters. I take my lead
here from Marx & Engels. The Manifesto of the Communist Party begins with a
gothic image: "There is a spectre haunting Europe - the spectre of
communism". Bourgeois capitalism required a proletariat that, like
Frankenstein's monster, would then threaten its existence. A more recent
take on the same theme - I think so, anyway - would be the Stallone
character in First Blood, a Vietnam Vet who threatens to destroy the society
that created him. We can see connections between this narrative and the
Western hero I've already mentioned, Ethan Edwards (also a war Vet, a man of
violence who presents a challenge to the nascent bourgeois community
depicted by Ford in his Westerns - and certainly, if you want to know what
Ford thought of the family as a site of sexual repression, you only have to
watch the first 20 minutes or so of The Searchers).

I'm starting to ramble again. I've just been thinking of the alternative
religions Thompson describes in Witness Against The Beast, which sends me
back to Keith Thomas and Religion And The Decline Of Magic.