VL--IV Passivity, more active thoughts

[Carvill, John]

Mbailey wrote:

<<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?>>

True.

The old 'Pynchon can't - and therefore doesn't - do characters' canard
eh? I touched on this in my popmatters blurb for ATD:

"There are plenty of Pynchon's usual postmodernist shenanigans; but
enjoyable though these are, they should not be allowed to obscure the
simple fact that Pynchon is the finest prose stylist alive, and one who
is-contrary to the standard critical view-more than capable of handling
emotion. Consider the following passage, describing a father and
daughter roaming the American heartland, the girl's mother having run
off with another man, seemingly on a whim: 

Planted rows went turning past like giant spokes one by one as they
ranged the roads. The skies were interrupted by dark gray storm clouds
with a flow like molten stone, swept and liquid, and light that found
its way through them was lost in the dark fields but gathered shining
along the pale road, so that sometimes all you could see was the road,
and the horizon it ran to. Sometimes she was overwhelmed by the green
life passing in such high turbulence, too much to see, all clamoring to
have its way. Leaves sawtooth, spade-shaped, long and thin,
blunt-fingered, snowy and veined, oiled and dusty with the day-flowers
in bells and clusters, purple and white or yellow as butter, star-shaped
ferns in the wet and dark places, millions of green veilings before the
bridal secrets in the moss and under the deadfalls, went on by the
wheels creaking and struck by rocks in the ruts, sparks visible only in
what shadow it might pass over, a busy development of small trailside
shapes tumbling in what had to be deliberately arranged precision, herbs
the wild-crafters knew the names and market prices of and which the
silent women up in the foothills, counterparts whom they most often
never got even to meet, knew the magic uses for. They lived for
different futures, but they were each other's unrecognised halves, and
what fascination between then did come to pass was lit up, beyond
question, with grace.

It's a great example of the way Pynchon can compress an immensity of
character and emotion into a very short space. One essential element in
his ability to do this is the sheer virtuosity and beauty of his prose,
its poetry and jazz rhythms, which he uses to build up a sense of
artistic wonderment which he then discharges with that little laconic
snap of emotion at the end. It says so much more about the relationship
between a father and daughter, who've both been abandoned by the same
woman, than if he went on and on about the pair's emotional connections
for page after page."

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/against-the-day-by-thomas-pynchon1/


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Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2009 17:52:46 -0500
From: "Michael Bailey" < >
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...


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