Paranoia: What is a character?

[Paul Mackin]

I do think it makes sense to respond emotionally to fictional characters and
the fact that they are robots is no barrier. Would never want to say that
talking about the psychological or ethical states of people in novels is not
interesting. It would be hard to read a novel in which one could not
identify is some way with a character or two. But in order to have criticism
or analysis (that word again) the character needs to be seen as functional
with regard to the book--I think is the point. So it's not that any one
person in the book is paranoid but the book itself is. Just as it was as
important that Blicero was a sadomasochist (if that's what he was) than that
chunks of Gravity's Rainbow are sadomasochistic But back to paranoia. In M&D
there's apparently a whole lot of paranoia going on. What can we take it to
mean? I don't have any quick answer but will think about it.

        P.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2001 7:39 AM
Subject: Re: Paranoia: What is a character?


>
>
> 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
>