Can Pynchon write (yet)?

[D.]

Every time I read some commentary or invective against
Pynchon's characters, I think of the following
paragraph from J. Kerry Grant's forward to his A
Companion to V. and not trouble myself too much
further.  It seems to say the same as Mr. Nightingale
said, only a bit more succintly perhaps.  At the risk
of fair use violation, the paragraph goes:


If Thomas Pynchon knows anything, and it's clear he
knows a great deal, it is the intriguing fact that,
despite attack after attack on the conventional
certainties enshrined in the genre, most novel readers
bring with them to each text a set of remarkably
conservative expectations.  Despite the competing
influence of a culture thoroughly imbued with the
probabilistic assumptions of post-Newtonian physics,
the abrupt discontinuities of its dominant medium,
television, and a faith in the capacity of individuals
to transform themselves from moment to moment
according to the dictates of fleeting rules of
"style," most readers continue to hope for closure,
for sustained narrative momentum, and for "rounded"
characters launched on a trajectory of emotional and
psychological development.  Pynchon has consistently
made it his business to call into question both these
expectations and the epistemological assumptions that 
inform them.


Cheers,

D.


--- Paul Nightingale <isread at btopenworld.com> wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> 



 
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