ATDTDA (3) Dynamitic mania, 80-86

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Paul Mackin wrote:

>I do rather disagree with the contention that AtD draws the  reader
>INto story. Relative to GR perhaps it does.  But making any real
>effort at drawing the reader IN, making him  care very much about
>what happens to  the characters,  isn't  IMO the way  Pynchon works.
>He certainly doesn't "work" for me that  way. It's not that I  doubt
>his being  a brilliant writer, or that I didn't enjoy much that was
>in AtD, or that I would not find even more to enjoy upon another
>reading. There is always plenty  to be gotten out of a Pynchon novel.
>It's not engagement with any of the characters, however.

And then David Morris wrote:

>I pretty much agree with you Paul.  Pynchon's characters often do
>things that make me not "feel" them as "real."  We have to ponder what
>are their motives, and clues are laid to unravel the dynamics at work
>and why the choices are made, and I think that is Pynchon's goal.

In fact I pretty much agree with both of you - if, Paul, it is permissible 
to "agree" with disembodied electronic "voices" that hold no more reality 
for me than Pynchon's fictional characters ;-)
When I speak of Pynchon drawing readers into his texts, I'm not so much 
thinking of the old-fashioned way of drawing the reader into the story by 
making him identify with and care about the characters: "Golly, I sure hope 
Rosalie will follow her heart and marry Harry the honest farmhand instead of 
the evil Count who is trying to cheat her out of her inheritance"-sort of 
thing.

What I was trying to say in my previous post was that Pynchon creates works 
of such atounding complexity that in a sense they constitute small worlds in 
themselves. Remember that small bit from the dustjacket of AtD (penned by 
Pynchon himself): "Maybe it's not the world, but with a minor adjustment or 
two it's what the world might be." Much so-called realistic fiction that 
draws readers into the story by letting him identify with the characters is 
anything but realistic. Such novels often present us with the traditional - 
and deeply artificial - linear and Aristotelean plot, with a beginning, a 
middle, and an end, and we seem almost genetically predisposed to be 'drawn 
into' such stories.
Pynchon's fiction, on the other hand, doesn't come in those neat little 
prepackaged plots that are so effective at drawing readers into the story. 
"Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day's 
end" we hear in GR (p. 204), and in his big novels Pynchon certainly doesn't 
juggle events into any kind of sense for us. Novels such as GR and AtD are 
big and messy, they're complex and confusing, they're saturated with 
information, things are not always resolved, and when we meet a character 
for the first time, we've no way of knowing whether he'll turn out to be 
important, or whether he'll disappear again in a couple of pages. Such 
complexity, such density of detail is IMO more real than most realistic 
fiction in that it approaches the complexity of the world we have to move 
through every day. Real life is messy, it's saturated with information, 
things are not always resolved, and when we meet a new person we've no 
chance of knowing (as we do in the kind of fiction that more easily lets us 
identify with the characters) whether he or she will turn out to be a 
soulmate or whether s/he will disappear just as quickly as s/he appeared.

I tend to believe that Pynchon's big novels are deliberate attempts at 
creating microcosms that are the formal equivalent of the richness, 
complexity, terror and beauty of the world we move through. Such 
encyclopedic narratives, to use Mendelson's nice phrase, perhaps don't so 
much draw the reader into the story as situate him in a confusing textual 
environment that mirrors both the confusing fictional world the characters 
move through and our own confusing reality. Perhaps Pynchon doesn't so much 
let us identify with his characters as place us on the same level as them. 
They and we are faced with many of the same choices and encounter many of 
the same moral quandaries as we move through the fictional world/the text, 
respectively. When Pynchon in GR speaks of "the path you must create by 
yourself alone in the dark" (136), I think he speaks of both the characters' 
trajectory through the text, the act of reading that text, and of our life 
outside that text. The structure of the text is a formal reenactment of the 
world described in that text, and that world mirrors our own. Reading a 
novel by Pynchon thus becomes not an act of consumption, where a more or 
less passive reader is 'drawn into' the text, but an act of active 
participation in its textual world. It's perhaps not so much a matter of 
engaging with the characters, as you rightly point out, Paul, as of engaging 
with the problems they have to engage with. In that sense, however, I DO 
think it is perfectly possible to identify with the characters, and I DO 
wish that Frank hadn't blown up that damn train.

Best,

Tore

_________________________________________________________________
Vælg selv hvordan du vil kommunikere - skrift, tale, video eller billeder 
med MSN Messenger:  http://messenger.msn.dk/  - her kan du det hele