Repost: The Big One

[Ian Livingston]

Well,

Maybe I'm confused about what makes a character "round."  Many authors, yes,
offer characters from within, if you will, talking about their moral and
intellectual struggles as if the author and therefore the reader were, in
fact, occupying that character's ego.  Many other authors present characters
that become quite well-rounded without ever getting inside the character's
head.  Hemmingway comes quickly to mind.  Joyce, too, on occasion, and his
smarter sister in crime, Virginia Woolf.  It seems to me that what makes a
character more or less round is the degree of change that character
evidences over the course of the narrative.  For instance, how much does
Cyprian change, or deepen as we get to know him?  Frank?  Vibe?  Dally?
Yash? Kit?  etc.  It seems to me some of these characters are more rounded
than others, because we get to know them better and watch them change over
time, deepen as individuals.  Vibe is clearly flat, stock.  He *is* the
greed he is meant to portray and nothing more.

The point is, moral struggle is not necessarily something we have to
explicitly hear.  We can observe it.  When Yashmeen loses her ability to
warp space and time, what do we know about her experience of that loss? (or
gain?)  When people experience moral turmoil it really is rather rare that
they are able to formulate the questions, much less explicitly contemplate
the issues involved.  Why should it be otherwise with characters?  After
all, characters are the issue of human intelligence, they are born of the
workings of an individual mind, shadows cast on the cave wall by the
interior light of the microcosmic Sol.  Is it not proper that they should
resemble us?  I have often been alienated and dismayed by characters who
seem to know too much about themselves and the world, who are not a little
lost in things and acting largely on impulse, mostly mimetically.  It is
something I especially like about Pynchon's characters that they are so
often mute on the subject of subjective experience and, when we do see or
hear their subjective experience, it is so often a sort of "Whoa!  What's
happening here?"  Not some concise summary of the intellectual and moral
consequences of everything a la Hesse or Frank Herbert, perhaps even Cormac
McCarthy at times.  We do not, for instance, hear Cyprian's cognitive
struggles over his decision to stay at the convent, to leave his worldly
lovers in favor of a divine lover.  But we see that he changes as a result
of the subjective turmoil.  He doesn't just jump ship, he is torn and
decides.  Little as I identify with him at some levels, it is the *way* he
negotiates his doubts that makes him a powerful, round character.

But then, maybe I am mistaken about "roundness."

And if Oedipa is flat, I am really confused.  Or Katje.  Or Pugnax, for that
matter.

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 11:32 PM, David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com>
wrote:

>
> On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 (23:44:27 -0400), Laura (kelber at mindspring.com) wrote:
>
> > If you're expecting an impassioned defense of TRP's ability to draw
> well-rounded characters, you won't be getting it from me.
>
> Well, no, actually, I wasn't, which is why I said it was a joke, satire.
>
> And that's twice I've apparently unintentionally implied something that I
> did not mean to convey.
>
> I'll try asking questions for the third time and then just shut up, which
> seems, perhaps, to be desired.
>
> Sticking with the topic at hand, don't most writers create rounded
> characters by presenting a moral dilemma and then demonstrating the
> character's inner struggle and the resulting moral evolution?
>
> Does Pynchon do this?
>
> If not, why? If so, where and why? (Some postings have already answered
> this as "yes"; specifically, both Laura and Mark pointed to Frank and the
> train crash on page 985.)
>
> Finally, does Pynchon's moral view point extend beyond the reaction of his
> characters' individual personal reactions to their individual dilemmas?
>
> Please take my comments a face value, b/c my son bought ice cream from an
> ice-cream truck for the first time yesterday. Boy-oh-boy was he ever excited
> to learn that people actually drive around in trucks full of ice cream on
> hot summer days, trying to unload their merchandise.
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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