Prising some Character and Emotion out of Pynchon's Books

[Michael Bailey]

Characters and Emotions in Pynchon's Novels

>3) Gravity's Rainbow
>a) the Kirghiz Light episode (as an example of emotion)
>b) Slothrop (an example of character)3) Gravity's Rainbow
>a) the Kirghiz Light episode (as an example of emotion)
>b) Slothrop (an example of character)

The high point of the Freytag's Triangle of this pseudo-term-paper
actually occurred for me in responding to Dave's summing-up question.
The major work being done, therefore, and _Inherent Vice_ ever closer,
combine to make finishing my curriculum here both easy and pleasant -
from a writing-it perspective, and I hope also for anyone who reads it.

As a Pynchon character would, I've been focusing on an elusive
quantity, or a set composed of members which may share very little
besides the characteristic of my including them in the set.

My analysis tries to prove that people should have emotions about P's
characters.
My proof comes down to the private feelings I have when reading,
which are scarcely objective and therefore not amenable to an analytic form.
Perhaps, ultimately, not even communicable.
For instance, the fact that as I wrote about not caring very much about
Oedipa, I started to care more about her.  This surely wasn't evident...was it?

But, like Stencil, I forge onward, perhaps revealing something anyway.

The Kirghiz Lights episode for me fulfills all kinds of philosophical and
structural desiderata: the lone individual seeking a peak experience separates
himself from the  crowd and rides out alone.  He ignores the implicit warning
in the old balladeer's traveling directions.  He ignores the community
around the
fire, as he is only there for a map to somewhere else.  Yet the community around
the fire is where it's happening...

The emotions I felt reading, and feel remembering, are bound up with
those thoughts,
of course.  The words that describe Tchitcherine, this scene, his momentum,
trigger a glow that illuminates numerous impressions I've had over the
years and,
because of the author's skill, allows me to form a new memory
including transmogrifications
of feeling associated with the previous scenes.  Is there anything
else I can claim?  Well, yes, perhaps, maybe a feeling that
contemplating Tchitcherine and the Kirghiz Lights is worth doing, that
there's a fondness one can have for those specific characterizations -
more than just as illustrations of didactic points.

(Although it wouldn't be worthwhile to write or read a book without
a plenitude of didactic points...so perhaps the fondness for a particular
character is like Dixon having a nickname for his surveying tool: "Old Circ"...)


Moving on - I told you this would be quick and fun!

Slothrop, some would say, doesn't inspire us to feel any sympathy with him.
But I did from the first.  I refute you thus!

There's at least one scene that jerks tears:
"Yesterday happened to be a good day.  They found a child, alive, a little girl,
half-suffocated under a Morrison shelter.  Waiting for the stretcher,
Slothrop held her small hand, gone purple with the cold.   Dogs barked in the
street.  When she opened her eyes and saw him her first words were,
"Any gum, chum?"  Trapped there for two days, gumless - all he had for her
was a Thayer's Slippery Elm.  He felt like an idiot.  Before they took her off,
she brought his hand over to kiss anyway, her mouth and cheek in the flare lamps
cold as frost, the city at once around them a big, desolate icebox,
stale-smelling
and no surprises inside ever again.  At which point she smiled, very faintly,
and he knew that's what he'd been waiting for, wow, a Shirley Temple
smile,  as if
this exactly cancelled all they'd found her down in the middle of.  What a damn
fool thing."

Besides building the picture, he shows Slothrop going beyond the boundaries
of it.  He's not a big thinker, but his dissatisfaction and fear make it
emotionally clear that there's something wrong with the picture.

He doesn't hog the action - the supporting characters are much more vivid in GR
than in V..

In thinking here, I can understand why James Wood might call this novel
hysterically realist.  He might perceive Slothrop's gradual fading as
an auctorial
throwing-up of hands - what, finally, could Slothrop learn or become that would
make him the equal or master of the forces in his world?

The thing is, he does find his harmonica.  Easy to neglect the
significance of that,
but if you really care about Slothrop (...stamp your feet...), it does
make a difference.

One more installment and then I can close with accurate enough
insults to myself that may spare anyone else the effort...




-- 
"My God, I am fully in favor of a little leeway or the damnable jig is
up! " - Hapworth Glass