VL--IV Passivity, more active thoughts

[Robin Landseadel]

I'm not about to suggest that TRP is a master of character  
development. Then again, neither are Jonathan Swift or Voltaire and as  
far as I'm concerned Satire is Pynchon's bailiwick.

Vineland is overtly comic, from its Rip van Winkle opening to its  
storybook ending, Rossini to Gravity's Rainbow's Wagner. There is  
something particularly dark and portentous in the overall tone of GR— 
one might project a seriousness of meaning onto the walking ciphers of  
that WWII epic that cannot be applied to the caricatures of Vineland.  
A lot of readers who reject Vineland will never find it funny, or  
worthwhile because it lacks that seriousness of tone. The passage in  
Gravity's Rainbow that affected me to a greater degree than any other  
is the soirée at the home of Stephan Utgarthaloki. All of those  
disgusting items that the ghost of Brigidier Pudding cooked up made me  
laugh so hard I nearly lost control.

V. doesn't work for me for the very reasons cited by malignd; the  
novel suffers from the same shallowness that "makes his short stories  
seem the work of no more than a precocious adolescent," though I'd  
make a possible exception of "The Secret Integration."

If I have a particular fondness for The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland,  
it is because Pynchon captures so much of the character and spirit of  
the particular places described, places I've lived in and wandered  
through. There's a certain surreal element of California that the  
author captures, a quality I relate to that I've found in no other  
author's work. The speech patterns, dietary habits and social  
groupings captured in these books may be no deeper or more realist  
than found in the work of Richard Brautigan or Tom Robbins' but I find  
them every bit as amusing anyway. Certainly Pynchon is better at  
ideas, descriptive passages and wordplay than character development.

Perhaps due to personal experience, I can easily connect to Prairie's  
situation. My mother is as much a mythic creature of the 60's as  
Frenesi, and in her own way just as inaccessible. Prairie reaches out  
to an assemblage of projected images of her mother, all filtered by  
her assumptions of what "the 60's" really means, assumptions created  
in large part by images she recieved via "The Tube."

On Jan 6, 2009, at 3:05 PM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> 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
>