VL--IV Passivity, more active thoughts

[kelber at mindspring.com]

We keep getting back to the issue of Pynchon's characters and I think we'd all agree that if you're looking for rich character studies, don't bother with Pynchon.  Still, there's a lot of variation in the success of his characters.  I've argued before that characters who achieve protagonist or dual-protagonist status are richer than the ensemble characters, not so much as believable human beings, but as viewpoints for the reader, stances from which to observe the world.  Slothrop, Oedipa, Profane, Stencil, Mason and Dixon are more memorable, create more emotions in us, because they have some sort of identifiable outlook (paranoia, hedonism, etc.) that colors the entire book.  Zoyd, Frenesi, DL, and Prairie, as an ensemble cast, combine to drown each other out and muddle the story.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: malignd at aol.com
>Sent: Jan 6, 2009 5:31 PM
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: VL--IV Passivity, more active thoughts
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><<but that's one of the things that rings most true.  Isn't it?
>Hmmm?  Hmmm?  Eh, wot?
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>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.>>
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>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.
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>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.)
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>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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