Creative Freedom in Nabby and the Pynch

[jbor]

on 16/6/03 4:42 AM, Otto wrote:

> "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)

There's not really that much of a contrast here. Nabokov is specifically
talking about characterisation as a component of the "private world" created
by the author. Pynchon is addressing something else: the way that characters
in fiction end up speaking and behaving in ways which are consistent with
who they are, rather than conforming to a "message" or "meaning" which is a
function of the "plot" decided on beforehand by the author. (There's a bit
of a play on the dual meanings of the term "plot" here, and it's Pynchon's
segue into a discussion of the complex and interesting characterisation of
Julia in _1984_.) It also ties in with his comment in the _SL_ 'Intro' that
it "is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying
agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it." (p.12)

I don't think that Pynchon is arguing that characters "take hold" of the
author or that they "dictate the course of the action" in a novel, and I
think he would agree with Nabokov that "stability and truth", in terms of
characterisation and human interactions, is one of the primary aims in the
process of literary creation.
 
best