Kick-Ass Thank You

[Mark Kohut]

A-And, as an ass-end coda to your ass-kicking questions, I will offer a bit more
  on the "human motivation" of Lake and Deuce for any P-listers who will read and want to respond over the weekend.
   
  I'm ready for arguments here.....kick my ass....
   
  The "human motivation" is .......barely there, missing.....something TRP has been faulted
  for being unable to do (well).....something he thinks in ATD, not worth even much trying too hard to do......to me, their coming together----and Lake's feeling that she is 'bad" were
  all in the service of TRP's ideas within the book............she carried the "sins of the father" within her......a Hawthornian and general family novel idea.......
   
  And Deuce and Lake's marriage to was make a point about lines, bloodlines of collusion in History, in America.
   
  Their 'coming together' was almost laughable to me, psychologically, as given us.
   
  I reflect on this aspect of Pynchon, trying to understand it. I GENERALLY like rich "human" characters in novels.......but if a major theme of TRP's is that I---WE---have no idea of how rich humanity could be, could have been, AT ONE TIME WAS and that all of the History (with people) that he puts on paper shows how thin, predetermined, they are, then I--WE--better understand this.
   
  We know from Slow Learner that TRP knows this was a weakness of his, but.....what does he see as the way it should be?
   
  Still trying to learn how to read after all these years, I was reading I. A. Richards' Prinicples of Literary Criticism--another book we know [from ATD allusion] TRP has read. Published 1927. A classic. And in it he writes that so many--most?--motives in fiction explained psychologically seem simplistic, don't they? 1927. For psychological depth, how do you better Proust or James? (Pugnax, reading James, preferred "lurid' tales about his own species). And we have seen TRP's eviscerating satiric take on doctors of the mind....[the dentist-doc in V.; Dr. Hilarious in CL49)
   
  "Somewhere around 1910 human nature changed", wrote Virginia Woolf and Pynchon understands that in ways V. Woolf didt'n, I wrote in response to James Wood's NR review.
  (unpublished, of ourse)
   
  Memorialize this weekend, all,
   
  MK
  

Jasper <jasper.fidget at gmail.com> wrote:
  Well I gave it a shot. I wanted to get more people participating, thus 
all the (possibly inane) questions. Mostly it was just the regulars 
though, and we should all thank them for keeping this going. I don't 
blame anyone for lurking (or just ignoring); I expect to go back to 
doing that myself.

I am curious why there were only a couple of comments on the last two 
questions about character motivations and psychology (Why Lake + Deuce, 
and why Lake thinks she's "bad"). I figured those would do a lot better 
than the more abstract questions about mirroring and dreams and "Them". 
And I'm probably a sucker to expect more than a couple-three replies to 
a poll, but anyway, what was the problem:

a) The text is too cryptic to understand character motivations
b) The text is too brief to really discuss anything about the characters
c) Pynchon's characters aren't traditional characters so we shouldn't 
treat them that way
d) It's a big complex book and I haven't gotten a handle on it yet
e) The answers were obvious and the questions pointless
f) The list is not a safe enough environment for offering readings that 
others may consider wrong or silly or unsupportable
g) Other -- fill in the space provided:

Anyway, whatever the reason, let me just toss this sputtering torch in 
Keith's direction: it's all you now, tiger! As Dylan said to Columbus, 
"Good luck."



robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:
> I feel a need right now to thank Jasper for the Kick-Ass job he did of taking 
> over the helm for this passage of AtD. Loved the questions, how they 
> invited and generated discussions.
> Too cool!
>
> 



       
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