Concepts as characters (was: Why don't women read Pynchon?)

[Monte Davis]

Ya Sam:

> In fact I feel emotionally engaged with some of the
> characters, and I am not 
> altogether indifferent to their fates. I follow their 
> progress with my 
> breath bated. There are also a couple of characters I am 
> really disgusted 
> with and want them to be punished for what they did. So it's not only 
> literary allusions and concepts for me.

I'd like to tease this thread out of "male vs. female readers," which IMHO
brings in lots of irrelevant baggage. A goosd starting point is what I wish
I'd read before: ALL (it's shoirt) of this link Laura provided:

http://www.thephoenix.com/article_ektid28706.aspx

In it, Cris Rodriguez writes:

"What all these readers miss is that you can read concepts like characters.
I care about paranoia in The Crying of Lot 49. I care about identity and
chaos in Gravity's Rainbow. I want to understand how the ideas tick the same
way you might want to figure out the psychology of a protagonist.     

"I'm not motivated, while reading any of Pynchon's novels, by what's going
to happen to the characters. The only reason I keep on reading is to follow
the thought, to trace the ideas past the characters that represent them and
recognize that the operative mode in a Pynchon novel is play..."

That speaks to me -- as do the responses to Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia,
stirred up again by the new NYC production of "Voyage." I mean, why should
anyone care about a bunch of Russian and German geeks tying themselves into
knots about concepts, just because it drove a large part of what we've lived
through in the last 150 years?

It's an error to concede -- or, more often, just take for granted -- any
neat disjunction between cerebral, bloodless "concept" and warm, human
"character." Fiction and drama do many, many things, not all of them
exhausted by "identification with" characters with "psychological depth and
realism." That's a great tradition (*The* Great Tradition in one
formulation), but far from the only one.

I care about Don Quixote in large part because of Cervantes' play with the
*concept* of chivalric fantasy shaping character, expectations of oneself
and of windmills, and behavior. Ditto for Madame Bovary and her r/Romantic
fantasies. Ditto for Slothrop and Oedipa and Stencil as heirs to Tannhauser,
Parsifa, and Henry Adams. 

I care about Natasha, Pierre, Andrei & co. in large part because of
Tolstoy's play with the *concept* of how individual agency fits into
historic events on a grand scale. Ditto for Sydney "It is a far, far better
thing I do" Carton and Madame Defarge. Ditto for Cyprian Latewood, who's
gonna break your heart if he hasn't already. 

I care about Bouvard & Pecuchet as I do for their ancestor/descendants,
Charles and Jeremiah, in large part because of the courage and idiocy, the
hopefulness and hopelessness, of their efforts to see around or see through
the *concepts* that also, inevitably, shape and constrain them.

Don't know about you, mes freres, mes semblables, but I see people very much
like that all around me every day. Some of them have read their Cervantes,
Flaubert, Dickens, Tolstoy; most haven't, but that doesn't mean their human
nature hasn't been shaped by what C,F,D,T fed into the culture. As Keynes
said about the cerebral, bloodless "concepts" of economics and political
philosophy:

"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any
intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy
from some academic scribbler of a few years back."

Try extending that to the domain of "rounded characters" and "psychological
realism." A very large part of what we mean by those terms is not in fact
some genetic given; it was *invented* by scribblers from Chretien de Troyes
to Dante to Shakespeare to Austen... all of whom stretched what had been
considered "human nature" before them. And I'm betting that in a century or
three, the allegedly cerebral, bloodless inventions in Bloom and Molly, Reef
and Dally, will no longer be "intellectual influences," but the common coin
of what we are.