Can Pynchon write (yet)?

[Paul Nightingale]

When I say P's 'characters are a running commentary on the process of
writing characters' I mean their function, as characters, is to emphasise
the act of writing; and I think this involves rather more than the writer
acknowledging the artificiality of their work. After all, to speak of the
novel as 'artificial' is to recognise something else ('the real world') as
'not-artificial'. I've always said that P is interested in how we know what
we (think we) know. So the P-text does more than simply describe its
characters; we're supposed to be thinking of the way the character has been
'put together' (see my comments on GR below). This isn't just a feature of
something called postmodernist writing: I would recognise a similar approach
in, eg, Coover, or dramatists like Beckett and Barker, but not many others.

My initial post last year on the opening to GR:

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0510&msg=98814&sort=date

Pirate's introduction offers an alternative way of setting the/a scene; and
it also juxtaposes the banality of a character waking/starting to think
about breakfast to that character's role as a soldier at war. On 5, we are
given his rank, his training by the SOE, his missions behind enemy lines, as
well as: "Pirate has become famous for his Banana Breakfasts. Messmates
throng here from all over England ..." etc. The Banana Breakfast is a
bizarre notion, a caricature of the 'making-do' that would accompany
rationing; yet the text introduces it with a note of plausibility, the
friend who provides the saplings. I've no idea whether or not this
explanation actually is plausible: what's important is the appearance in the
text of plausibility, the grounding of the action in something called
'reality'. The moment also invokes what we might call a hidden economy (see
the Watts and Luddite essays, as well as WASTE; on WW2 in Britain see Angus
Calder's The People's War, first published in 1968 and, if not a source for
GR, then part of the prevailing intellectual climate).

I suspect, when we speak of 'rounded' characters, we think of them somehow
there, in place, fully-formed, prior to the act of reading: the writer aims
for some kind of psychological realism and we judge the text in terms of
verisimilitude, characters in terms of the plausibility of their actions. We
might or might not have access to their thoughts, that isn't the issue. We
might be 'surprised' by the 'complex' character, but in fact the
characterisation-as-writing is often quite predictable: the reader is asked
to calculate how far they can recognise, in the text, (what they think is)
the real world and the way people behave in that real world. Criticism might
judge characterisation in terms of the character's 'development', but of
course there isn't any: 'development' simply refers to the way the unfolding
text offers more information about a character that begins fully-formed.
Another way of putting it: think of the text as a series of problems to be
solved by the writing? Rather than asking what the character does, ask how
the writing proceeds from first page to last.

One of the great ironies, for me, of the way different people read and talk
about reading is the assumption that the text has to stand by itself. So,
for example, some readers criticise any kind of intertextual reading on the
grounds that it isn't part of the novel, 'you don't need to know that stuff
to read the novel' (eg my reference above to Calder). What you should focus
on is the 'world of the novel'. But this begs the question: how far does the
novel's world include an extra-textual dimension (ie the plausibility that
invokes the real world)?

It's a question of approach, how we go about reading this stuff. My idea of
reading is to say that, at the beginning of GR, P doesn't write
realistically or non-realistically, he juxtaposes elements of different
kinds of writing. The character is introduced as part of that process.