VL--IV Passivity, more active thoughts

[malignd at aol.com]

<<but that's one of the things that rings most true.  Isn't it?
Hmmm?  Hmmm?  Eh, wot?

Why do our lives take the courses they do?   We have a little control
over some things, but as Eliot said, we often surrender to "a moment's
abandon that an age of prudence can never undo" Freud couldn't answer
"What do women want?" even to his own satisfaction ... etc.>>

This is certainly not the first, but certainly one of the most egregious, examples of insisting that a writerly weakness, because it is Pynchon's, is not a weakness at all, rather a strength.



He writes flat, two-dimensional characters.  Sometimes it serves him--it is part of the entire feel of GR--but it diminishes the other novels and makes his short stories seem the work of no more than a precocious adolescent.  (Compare Slow Learner to Dubliners, each written by authors, often compared, at approximately the same age of life.)




The points you raise can be valid:  Harold Pinter refused to provide anything like motivation or back story for his characters:  Who knows what drives them?  Famously asked about a character's motivation by an actor, he replied that he had no idea.  However, it is an actor's job to provide that, to inform his character with a history and with motivation, to make choices, as actors say, and so Pinter's characters come fully to life (In the best of circumstances; not, given a bad actor.)  The novel, however, is not a collaborative art form. 













 




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