Noir Classics

David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Thu Jul 9 14:24:45 CDT 2009


I don't know about your straw man: strictures of "good storytelling."  All I
know is that Lew, and so many other AtD characters were very forgettable,
and not because I was smoking a doobie at the time.  That wasn't the case
with GR's multitude.

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 1:38 PM, David Morris<fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Lew is an example of one of AtD's flaws:  It was filled with secondary
> characters who added little but distraction from whatever my have been
> the main point of this novel.
>
This is why I've long thought it's pointless to apply such strictures
> of "good storytelling" or whatever here, no matter what Pynchon
> himself might claim (I'm thinking the Responsorio ad Hollander).  I
> tend to think all tehse characters/elements/events/what have you DO
> have tehir specific, reasonable, worthwhile fuctions, they're just not
> the ones we're generally told to expect, is all.  My instinct here is,
> Those Pynchonian texts are highly allegorical, recall that
> (apocryphal, yes, but I like it, too)  remark about anatomical
> diagrams ...
>
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