Characterisation in Pynchon, Orwell, Nabokov

[jbor]

>>> "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.
> 
on 16/6/03 9:41 PM, Paul Mackin wrote:

> True.
> 
> Both authors are being semi-jocular in the way they extend the potential
> for fascism to the domain of literary creation--Pynchon with "the worst
> kind of totalitarian whim" and Nabokov with "perfect dictator."

I think Pynchon is perhaps overly sensitive to critical judgements of his
characterisations as "cartoonish", and has over-compensated for it a little
both in the _SL_ 'Intro', where, for example, he talks about the characters
in 'Under the Rose "no longer just lying there on the slab but beginning at
least to twitch some and blink their eyes open" (p.19, which would make of
the author Victor Frankenstein, a little bit like Nabokov's "perfect
dictator"!), and again here. I agree about the semi-jocularity of both P's
and N's comments.

The full context of the quote from the _1984_ 'Foreword' comment emphasises
the point Pynchon is making:

    [...] If this were really only a political essay disguised as a
    novel, Julia would most likely have been obliged to symbolize
    something - the Pleasure Principle, or Middle-class Common
    Sense or something. [xxii]

The fact that Julia is based on Orwell's second wife, as per the review
posted yesterday, goes a long way towards explaining why she is such an
interestingly-developed character in that novel.

As satirists, characterisation is where each of the three authors is bound
to come up short on occasion.

best