Creative Freedom in Nabby and the Pynch

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: <Bandwraith at aol.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 15, 2003 12:12 PM
Subject: Creative Freedom in Nabby and the Pynch


>     >>It's not a mere academic question, the narrator enigma in _Pale
>     Fire_, it's not a quibble. It goes to the heart of the mystery
>     within the fathomlessly refractive mirror-world of the novel, a
>     question about the nature of its design, of the design of creation
>     itself.<<
>
>
> http://www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=1085
>
> Not sure of Rosenbaum's intention in the last line of the above
> paragraph. Is he speaking about the design of PF, or, openning it
> up to include all human creation (or even Creation)? What does
> "itself" refer back to, I guess I'm wondering.
>
> The sequencing: "the design of creation" is challenging, in light
> of the indefiniteness of whether or not he is referring to just
> the design of PF, or a more generalizable notion of creation.
>
> Creation as either a verb or noun, with a little or a big C, begs
> the question of constraint, or the flipside, freedom. The Orwellian
> dialectic comes briefly to mind, but is quickly supplanted by
> Pynchon's comments in the Foreword regarding the ability of
> characters to develop independently of their author's original
> designs- not merely slaves, they.
>
> I think one area of interesting comparison and contrast between
> the two author's might be this notion of creative freedom.
>
> respectfully

Bandwraith is speaking of this part of the "Foreword":

"Novelists may wish to indulge the worst kinds of totalitarian whims
directed against the freedom of their characters. But often as not, they
scheme in vain, for characters always manage to evade one's all-seeing eye
long enough to think thoughts and utter dialogue one could never have come
up with if plot were all there were." (xxii)

versus
Appel: "One often hears from writers talk of how a character
 takes hold of them and in a sense dictates the course of the
action.  Has this ever been your experience?"

VN: "I have never experienced this.  What a preposterous experience!
Writers who have had it must be very minor or insane.  No, the design of
my novel is fixed in my imagination and every character follows the
course I imagine for him.  I am the perfect dictator in that private
world insofar as I alone am responsible for its stability and truth.
Whether I reproduce is as fully and faithfully as I would wish, is
another question.  Some of my old works reveal dismal blurrings and
blanks." (p 69)

"one's all-seeing eye" makes the author a godlike person.

If one buys P's notion a character in a novel might be allowed to say or do
very bad things, calling for regicide (PF cannot be read as a demand to kill
all kings named Charles) or genocide or ethnic cleansing for example and the
author, if attacked later by critics, could claim that it's not him who has
said so, who is responsible, but the protagonist, as if this character is an
autonomous entity - which he's not, he's part of the novel.

But on the other hand the author is only responsible for the text of the
novel itself (I'm not speaking of political pamphlets here), not what real
people later make of it, for example readers committing suicide (Goethe's
"Werther") or murdering people after the reading or, as it has happened in
the case of AC/DC lyrics, listening to it. Other examples would be the
Erfurt-killer who seemed to have been "inspired" by some ego-shooter
computer game or crusaders/suicide bombers who claim only to fulfil God's
will as presented in the holy scripts.

The author should remain in custody, even if he seems to vanish behind the
characters he has invented, or it is hard to tell who can be regarded as the
"author" of any given part of the text, which seems to be the case in PF and
kept the critics busy. In real life the flaws and actions of a person may be
senseless, but in a novel they're part of the plot.

John Barth seems to take N's point of view in his essay "How to Make a
Universe" but to me it looks as if he's not consequent when he says in the
following that the artist has no wish for control:

"The question before us is, How does one make a universe? (...) The
storytellers' trade is the manufacture of universes, which we do with great
or little skill regardless of explanations and interpretations. (...) You
hear it said that the novelist offers you an attitude toward life and the
world. Not so, except incidentally or by interference. What he offers you is
not a  Weltanschauung* but a *Welt*; not a view of the cosmos, but a cosmos
itself. (...) All the scientists hope to do is describe the universe
mathematically, predict it, and maybe control it. The philosopher, by
contrast, seems unbecomingly ambitious: He wants to *understand* the
universe; to get behind phenomena and operation and solve the logically
prior riddles of being, knowledge, and value. But the artist, and in
particular the novelist, in his essence wishes neither to explain nor to
control nor to understand the universe: He wants to make one of his own, and
may even aspire to make it more orderly, meaningful, beautiful and
interesting than the one God turned out. What's more, in the opinion of many
readers of literature, he sometimes succeeds."
(The Friday Book, 1984, p. 17)

As Barth points out further, what would Oedipus Rex be without his
disastrous search for the truth as shown by Sophocles? The catastrophe is
inevitable part of the plot. The middle part of "Chimera" (1972) presents
catastrophic results of Perseus' heroic quest as the effect of his being a
self-centered asshole and male-chauvinist pig.

Another texts that comes to my mind is Roland Barthes' "The Death of the
Author" from 1977 and although he doesn't mention N in this (later written
text) I would like to add this text to the sources used in our attempt to
draw "meaning" out of PF.

"Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story (...) Is it (...) the
author professing 'literary' ideas (...) Is it universal wisdom? Romantic
psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the
destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that
neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative
where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body
writing. No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a fact is narrated
no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that
is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very
practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses
its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins. The sense
of this phenomenon, however, has varied; in ethnographic societies the
responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a
mediator, shaman or relator whose 'performance' - the mastery of the
narrative code -may possibly be admired but never his 'genius'. The author
is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the
Middle Ages with English empiricism, (...) We know now that a text is not a
line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the
Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings,
none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations
drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."
http://www.eiu.edu/~literary/4950/barthes.htm

Theory has to follow art, not vice versa, or as Barth says: "(...) we had
rather make things that we can't explain than explain things we can't make."
(ibid)

Otto