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

[David Brodeur]

> What concepts drove M&D?
> 
> Also, do concepts differ from themes and ideas?
> 
> Also, are concepts in the text or are they something readers bring to the
> party?
> 
> Is it the case that males bring more concepts to their readings of texts
> than females?
> 
> Can a novel have fully developed  characters and themes and ideas and
> concepts?
> 
> Is Ender a concept or a character?
> 
> Is Ray Bradbury's story "There will come soft rains" (no human characters)
> a
> concept driven tale?
> 
> Also, is carl Barrington of P's TSI a concept character?

Ideas, themes, concepts, I'm not going to try to split those hares tonight.
I take Humpty-Dumpty's approach to words, they mean what I want them to, and
I pay them well for it. But this being Friday night, they're all blowing
their wages in town.

I do think the author plants concepts in the novel, which are imperfectly
decoded by the reader. If we're talking Kilgore Trout or a medieval morality
tale, then there may be little room for doubt, but in Pynchon's case it's
more a matter of being run through a series of mazes and trying to figure
out what patterns our travels might trace. 

Finding structure in a novel is different from finding it in nature. We see
face in clouds and the Virgin Mary in grilled cheese sandwiches because
we're determined to find patterns in things. But when I find a pattern in GR
there's a fair chance it's intentional. A watch implies a watchmaker, though
a rose is just a rose.

So what I get out of it is largely what I brought to it, but with some new
patterns of thought subtly woven into it. I do get the impression with some
postmodern literary criticism that it's all about what baggage the critic
has brought with him, talking about gender issues in Moby Dick or whatever.

Concept-driven fiction can certainly have fully developed characters. Mason
and Dixon seemed real to me; the first Pynchon protagonists I felt any
emotion for. But they are caught up in patterns they can't control and only
dimly suspect - the westward push of America, the lines that are being
drawn, the imposition of the straight lines of the enlightenment on the
wildernesses of both nature and man.

Ender is certainly a character, but the purpose of the stories is not to
tell you about Andrew Wiggin. He serves as a focal point through which you
experience the alien events of the novels. 

I don't know how the male-female thing works out, though the article that
sparked this was arguing that women are more attracted to stories about
human relationships. And that would be conventional and familiar
relationships, not negotiations with extraterrestrials. Again, being that
meaning is mostly what we bring to it, I know people for whom Speaker for
the Dead is all about Ender, and whose reaction to the story is to want to
pretend that they are Ender. A lot of popular fiction is about giving people
someone they can identify with, either in an action plot for the boys or a
relationship story for the girls.

As to which one of the Chums do I want to be, I'll have to think about it.

David