VL--IV Passivity, more active thoughts

[malignd at aol.com]

writer + reader, seems to me...a tight dyadic team...

I grimly anticipated this jejune response.


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tue, 6 Jan 2009 5:52 pm
Subject: Re: VL--IV Passivity, more active thoughts








malignd wrote:
>
> 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.
>

thank you.  I try to be egregious, when appropriate.


>
> 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.)
>

I'm tryin' to think...but nothing happens.  What in particular is more
deeply developed about say the wife in that snowfall story than
Frenesi?  Do we know why she rejected that dude that died for love of
her?

>
> 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
> of20circumstances; not, given a bad actor.)  The novel, however, is not a
> collaborative art form.
>

writer + reader, seems to me...a tight dyadic team...


-- 
--
"All the 3s are brown, and the 5s are gray" - Paint by Numbers song



 



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