Characters and caring in general and VLVL.

[Prsamsa at aol.com]

Here's a theory, from the hip, following reading of a DMorris post
on not caring much for VN after Lolita.  

The reason VL is harder to read and assimilate is because we care more
about the characters than any since Oedipas Maas.  In GR, we have been
weaned away from caring about most characters, since TSlothrop "simply"
loses his temporaral bandwith, his closest confidants (Squallidozzi, T
Mucker-Maffick, Katje, Geli) either disappear with no further explanation
or betray him somehow--shameless self-backpat--much like Chrissie is 
seen to have done to him by returning to Jules Siegel, in Lineland--

In all TP's work before the second half of GR, which I assume 
was written years after
the first part, TP's characters fall into bed, fall into fun, fall hard for 
someone--
perhaps Mimi Farina, going by scant evidence--but they don't seem
to have had their hearts broken, as Roger Mexico, lightly, and TSlotrop,
rendingly, seem to have in the more mature, later pages in GR.
That makes it easier to care for the characters AS  characters
and not fictional constructs.  

A note that VN's Lolita may have influenced TP more than I know,
we have to understand that Humbert's love for Lolita is really, all:
Control.  yes, capital C.  And so, how does a sensitive man respond
to the rumblings, then earthquake of feelings that feminism and loving/
associating with strong women like Baez, Mimi, as above, the model
for Oedipas, mentioned in passing in Lineland?--

I would suggest that TP had much of the turmoil and guilt and 
slowly growing acceptance that a man of that age had:  Weak passive
women just aren't that interesting to someone with a brain like TP's,
not after a night or two, and so nearly all his female characters are
at worst, credible, at best, loveable.  Who but TP would quote Dostevsky
from ..."Karamazov.."--Hell, my son, is simply an inability to love...

To throw some academic chestnuts in, we have in V., a dismantling
of the "mechanical", Victorian-ideal woman;  In CLOT49, "Immorata
Anonymous."  In GR, we have TSlothrop getting closer to some
ideal of love as letting go, as freer of control, as not just a body-count
on a map;  In Vineland, we have contemporary characters for the
first time since...CLOT49, and the author writes of his time with a passion
rarely voiced since Gatsby or Steinbeck--it seems to him, the whole
govt. is a Daisy-Tom Buchanan recklessness. 
      As affected as TP has said he is by the whole Beat-
60's era, when for a small window of time, it seemed America would
go beyond being a Puritan Commonwealth,  to see the neo-Puritans
elected and accepted (1980-1992) would produce a long, personal sad book that
would try to capture the feeling of freedoms slipping away.  We see
LOT49 and GR as more mythical, abstract, as more "conceits" to take
a neat metaphysical term.  But TP, metaphysical, is not a son of 
Bunyan and Donne for nothing--the bell tolls for thee.

By the time of Vineland, a more mature, loving person has had his heart
broken again by his own nation and is probably gritting his teeth too hard
to care about anything but sketching secondary characters, and getting
the conflict between freedom and repression down, the character of
Frenesi getting crushed between them--reminds me of what's said about
Woodrow Wilson, another Ivy Leaguer, who is said to have died of a broken
heart once his League of Nations idea was killed by the lobbyists
and wardheelers who run this country.  
 
Perry.  
I'm still on a roll.
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