Chracterization or CD in P's Novels

[terrance terrance]

A brief but useful introduction to the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characterization

In any number of posts, Paul Nightingale has argued that P's writing gets 
more and more sophisticated as he matures. P's writing is getting more and 
more sophisticated as he ages. In his published essays,  Pynchon, never one 
to say anything with clear and precise language, suggests that he has 
learned, slowly, to write. CD, as the Wiki article notes, is inter-connected 
with other literary elements and devices. On page 5 (Paperback) of the 
Introduction to Early Stories, Slow Learner Pynchon discusses one of many 
mistakes he made as a young writer:

"My mistake being to try to show off my ear before I had one."

He goes on to discuss how his "bad ear" mistake is componded by his 
insisting on making Tidewater diphthongs an element of the plot.

Character development is an extremely complex topic. Perhaps it's too 
complex to discuss here. However, Paul Nightingale argues that P's CD has 
become more sophisticated as he matures. Paul also claims that P's VL and 
M&D have more sophisticated structures than the earlier works (GR, CL49, 
V.). Pynchon seems to suggest this much in his essays. Paul Nightingale also 
says that P's later characters are more sophisticated because of P's use of 
the character-narrator. In other words, P narration has also matured and is 
more sophisticated in the latter novels. This is fairly obvious. Take 
Stencil for example. Great idea! Brilliant young author reads Henry Adams 
and "invents" a type of narration that may get him a few pages in Wayne C. 
Booth's Third Edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction. But Stencil can't hold a 
flashlight to the white alligator sucking his tail above and below the 
bombed out american/european theater/theatre mind of GR.

In GR P uses the 2nd person singular address so prevelant in Modern Poetry 
(see Eliot's Preludes). But what really makes GR great is the imagery. The 
narration in GR is Dickensian. It's the paranoid imagery that makes the 
narration so compelling! CD is not easy to discuss. It's a complex element 
of fiction. It's inter-connected with other elements and treating it is 
isolation is not quite fair to the author or the text.

Some examples of paranoid imagery from Dickens' masterpiece Great 
Expectations:

   If I slept at all that night, it was only to imagine myself
drifting down the river on a strong spring-tide, to the Hulks; a
ghostly pirate calling out to me through a speaking-trumpet, as I
passed the gibbet-station, that I had better come ashore and be
hanged there at once, and not put it off.  I was afraid to sleep,
even if I had been inclined, for I knew that at the first faint
dawn of morning I must rob the pantry.  There was no doing it in the
night, for there was no getting a light by easy friction then; to
have got one, I must have struck it out of flint and steel, and
have made a noise like the very pirate himself rattling his chains.

As soon as the great black velvet pall outside my little window was
shot with grey, I got up and went down stairs; every board upon the
way, and every crack in every board, calling after me, "Stop
thief!" and "Get up, Mrs. Joe!" In the pantry, which was far more
abundantly supplied than usual, owing to the season, I was very
much alarmed, by a hare hanging up by the heels, whom I rather
thought I caught, when my back was half turned, winking.  I had no
time for verification, no time for selection, no time for anything,
for I had no time to spare.  I stole some bread, some rind of
cheese, about half a jar of mincemeat (which I tied up in my
pocket-handkerchief with my last night's slice), some brandy from a
stone bottle (which I decanted into a glass bottle I had secretly
used for making that intoxicating fluid, Spanish-liquorice-water,
up in my room:  diluting the stone bottle from a jug in the kitchen
cupboard), a meat bone with very little on it, and a beautiful
round compact pork pie.  I was nearly going away without the pie,
but I was tempted to mount upon a shelf, to look what it was that
was put away so carefully in a covered earthen ware dish in a
corner, and I found it was the pie, and I took it, in the hope that
it was not intended for early use, and would not be missed for some
time.

There was a door in the kitchen, communicating with the forge; I
unlocked and unbolted that door, and got a file from among Joe's
tools.  Then, I put the fastenings as I had found them, opened the
door at which I had entered when I ran home last night, shut it,
and ran for the misty marshes.

It was a rimy morning, and very damp.  I had seen the damp lying on
the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying
there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief.
Now, I saw the damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like
a coarser sort of spiders' webs; hanging itself from twig to twig
and blade to blade.  On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy; and the
marsh-mist was so thick, that the wooden finger on the post
directing people to our village - a direction which they never
accepted, for they never came there - was invisible to me until I
was quite close under it.  Then, as I looked up at it, while it
dripped, it seemed to my oppressed conscience like a phantom
devoting me to the Hulks.

The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that
instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at
me.  This was very disagreeable to a guilty mind.  The gates and
dykes and banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they
cried as plainly as could be, "A boy with Somebody-else's pork pie!
Stop him!"  The cattle came upon me with like suddenness, staring
out of their eyes, and steaming out of their nostrils, "Holloa,
young thief!"  One black ox, with a white cravat on - who even had
to my awakened conscience something of a clerical air - fixed me so
obstinately with his eyes, and moved his blunt head round in such
an accusatory manner as I moved round, that I blubbered out to him,
"I couldn't help it, sir!  It wasn't for myself I took it!"  Upon
which he put down his head, blew a cloud of smoke out of his nose,
and vanished with a kick-up of his hind-legs and a flourish of his
tail.

Turning from the Temple gate as soon as I had read the warning, I
made the best of my way to Fleet-street, and there got a late
hackney chariot and drove to the Hummums in Covent Garden.  In those
times a bed was always to be got there at any hour of the night,
and the chamberlain, letting me in at his ready wicket, lighted the
candle next in order on his shelf, and showed me straight into the
bedroom next in order on his list.  It was a sort of vault on the
ground floor at the back, with a despotic monster of a four-post
bedstead in it, straddling over the whole place, putting one of his
arbitrary legs into the fire-place and another into the doorway,
and squeezing the wretched little washing-stand in quite a Divinely
Righteous manner.

As I had asked for a night-light, the chamberlain had brought me
in, before he left me, the good old constitutional rush-light of
those virtuous days - an object like the ghost of a walking-cane,
which instantly broke its back if it were touched, which nothing
could ever be lighted at, and which was placed in solitary
confinement at the bottom of a high tin tower, perforated with
round holes that made a staringly wide-awake pattern on the walls.
When I had got into bed, and lay there footsore, weary, and
wretched, I found that I could no more close my own eyes than I
could close the eyes of this foolish Argus.  And thus, in the gloom
and death of the night, we stared at one another.

What a doleful night!  How anxious, how dismal, how long!  There was
an inhospitable smell in the room, of cold soot and hot dust; and,
as I looked up into the corners of the tester over my head, I
thought what a number of blue-bottle flies from the butchers', and
earwigs from the market, and grubs from the country, must be
holding on up there, lying by for next summer.  This led me to
speculate whether any of them ever tumbled down, and then I fancied
that I felt light falls on my face - a disagreeable turn of thought,
suggesting other and more objectionable approaches up my back.  When
I had lain awake a little while, those extraordinary voices with
which silence teems, began to make themselves audible.  The closet
whispered, the fireplace sighed, the little washing-stand ticked,
and one guitar-string played occasionally in the chest of drawers.
At about the same time, the eyes on the wall acquired a new
expression, and in every one of those staring rounds I saw
written, DON'T GO HOME.

Whatever night-fancies and night-noises crowded on me, they never
warded off this DON'T GO HOME.  It plaited itself into whatever I
thought of, as a bodily pain would have done.  Not long before, I
had read in the newspapers, how a gentleman unknown had come to the
Hummums in the night, and had gone to bed, and had destroyed
himself, and had been found in the morning weltering in blood.  It
came into my head that he must have occupied this very vault of
mine, and I got out of bed to assure myself that there were no red
marks about; then opened the door to look out into the passages,
and cheer myself with the companionship of a distant light, near
which I knew the chamberlain to be dozing.  But all this time, why I
was not to go home, and what had happened at home, and when I
should go home, and whether Provis was safe at home, were questions
occupying my mind so busily, that one might have supposed there
could be no more room in it for any other theme.  Even when I
thought of Estella, and how we had parted that day for ever, and
when I recalled all the circumstances of our parting, and all her
looks and tones, and the action of her fingers while she knitted -
even then I was pursuing, here and there and everywhere, the
caution Don't go home.  When at last I dozed, in sheer exhaustion of
mind and body, it became a vast shadowy verb which I had to
conjugate.  Imperative mood, present tense:  Do not thou go home, let
him not go home, let us not go home, do not ye or you go home, let
not them go home.  Then, potentially:  I may not and I cannot go
home; and I might not, could not, would not, and should not go
home; until I felt that I was going distracted, and rolled over on
the pillow, and looked at the staring rounds upon the wall again.

I had left directions that I was to be called at seven; for it was
plain that I must see Wemmick before seeing any one else, and
equally plain that this was a case in which his Walworth
sentiments, only, could be taken.  It was a relief to get out of the
room where the night had been so miserable, and I needed no second
knocking at the door to startle me from my uneasy bed.

The Castle battlements arose upon my view at eight o'clock.  The
little servant happening to be entering the fortress with two hot
rolls, I passed through the postern and crossed the drawbridge, in
her company, and so came without announcement into the presence of
Wemmick as he was making tea for himself and the Aged.  An open door
afforded a perspective view of the Aged in bed.

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