VLVL Premodern Post Realist Cartoons.1

[Terrance]

Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> I've always felt that Pynchon's writing was an ongoing dialogue with
> traditional realism. I'm inclined to add that the continuing critical
> hegemony of such realism is unfortunate, given the refusal of readers,
> whatever guise they adopt, to take on board the post-realist lessons of
> Pynchon's work (and that of others, of course).

A lot of his characters, say Hector, Brock, Pointsman, Stencil, are
monomaniacs. 

Why are so many of Pynchon's characters Mad? 

Also, is the world representable from the writer's single point of view? 

If the things have  Fallen or are Falling Apart, 
can a writer depicting it,  
be truthful? Must she also have the courage 
to show it in its chaotic
state,  without any attempt to harmonize 
its violent contradictions?  

Implied Author? 

Why should editorial wisdom/commentary feign a 
sanity that no longer exists? 

Are P's novels chaotic books? 

Some of P's characters have a rigorous consistency and is restricted to
his/her own fanatical point of view. 

Monomaniac characters (Melville's Ahab) combine 
a premodern idea with a very modern
one. The premodern is the delight in type, and in the richness and
variety of character.


In the tradition of Renaissance heteroglossia (Bakhtin's term).  In the
satirical (the Mennipean reading of P has been discussed in the critical
literature and here on P-L). 
And in the parasitic countercurrent to traditional and dominant
literature (i.e., Rabelais and Cervantes). So, we have characters like
Marvy. Is he a cartoon or 
a traditional exaggeration of an individual ... caricature ... 
grotesqueness ... 

One of the strengths of GR is its profligate inventiveness of incident
and situation that presents monomania from ever new angles. In VL,
however, that inventiveness is lacking. Come on, how many jobs can Zoyd
have? DL can swing a gun, sing, put a vibrating palm on a guy, settle
into a Clark  Kent anonymity, kick ass in 60's revolutionary film
collective and partner up with Takeshi and Ralph and the Sisterhood and
....  or Sasha, like the Forest Gump of Labor History ... 

GR is much better at presenting the figural perspective, the view from
within the characters, which makes the reader privy to fanatical
consciousness. 

Some of GR's narrators are insane, fanatical, paranoid. 

And P does not present the characters from a sane authorial point of
view as aberrations to be laughed at. 

The authorial address and commentary so typical of the premodern
narrative style is not missing but is paranoid and self conscious. We
are tossed into the bombed out minds of characters or collective
consciousness (the ship of fools).