VL--IV Passivity, more active thoughts

[John Bailey]

I reckon Pynchon's novels are (partly) about the whole idea of
"character" as it developed in modern literature. They're open-ended
rather than closed systems. They don't evolve towards more "rounded"
or three-dimensional characters - Benny Profane leaves us with
"offhand I'd say I haven't learned a damned thing." I'd liken it to
the theory of the gaze in cinema, where the audience exercises power
over the onscreen character. Pynchon doesn't want us to control his
little playthings by understanding them - they're not real anyway - so
he uses all of these devices to give them a kind of autonomy.

I also wonder if this extends to his ideas about death in literature,
which in SL he says marks the maturity of a writer. That had me
thinking about the ethics of creating and then killing a character.
Pretty cruel to do that just to create pathos. And in all of his
novels, actual, final death is surprisingly rare. In VL everyone lives
on in some way. In GR the distinction between life and death is
impossible to understand. The only utter, final deaths that spring to
mind are Webb Traverse's and the face-down-in-the-mud-and-ice
Scarsdale, which he really deserves by then.

Just thinking out loud.

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 1:06 PM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> kelber 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.
>
>
> who's got better ones?
> sure, there's stuff about power, society and big ideas.  But you can
> get that in textbooks.
> The, or, a major anyway, hook that makes his presentation special is
> the characters.
>
> Dubliners: In what specific way are the characters in "Ivy Day in the
> Committee Room" more redolent of reality than Flange or Pig Bodine?
> In the Roger and Jessica sequences in GR, isn't anyone willing to say
> that meaningful glimpses of human nature surface?
>
> Don't Tchitcherine and Pirate Prentice, Hector and Rooney Winsome,
> Pointsman and Weissman, Mason and Dixon, provoke cogitations and
> worthwhile insights, not thorough explanations (which tend to be a
> llittle boring anyway, don't they?) but through sympathy and/or
> revulsion - human feelings they arouse?  By good characterization?
>
> Slothrop, far from disappearing in my mind, becomes more real
> throughout GR - contra even the text.  Even Benny Profane,
> deliberately constructed as a bit of a cipher, shines through in
> various ways, epiphanies tossed off casually, a datum here, a stray
> thought there.
>
> Doesn't anybody else feel, image, relish these people through the
> detail provided?  Am I that warped?  (Probably, but isn't anybody
> else?)
>
> Whose characters are more carefully constructed and come through more
> vividly than Pynchon's? In what way?  Examples, please?
>
> --
> --
> "All the 3s are brown, and the 5s are gray" - Paint by Numbers song
>