C of L 49: "That's how it is..most of the time."

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jul 14, 2009, at 2:15 PM, Campbel Morgan wrote:

> Robin, your reading of the satires seems to imply that the author is  
> a post-modern American Dickens. Is that right?

Haven't read enough Dickens. My sister is constantly trying to  
convince me to take on Bleak House.

> But do the characters matter all that much?

Well, the author does go to the effort with coming up with them and  
placing them in a moral universe, of sorts. They matter in the sense  
that they are the "work contents" of the books, so to speak.

> Do the themes, such as the dispossesed and the nameless Them(s)  
> matter in these works?

Like I said before, the author put those themes in the books so there  
ought to be some reason why they're there. I don't have any problem  
seeing their presence as meaningful.

> While the author admires Orwell, he doesn't write satires like  
> Orwell's satires.

He's too busy writing satires like Pynchon's satires.

> He thinks far too much of his own aethetics to waste his time with  
> Big Brother, farm animals,  and political satire.

Pardon, but I disagree. Seems to have a thing for dogs [not at all  
unlike Swift's & Orwell's thing for Horses], demonstrates the TUBE as  
the tool of THEM and if you aren't seeing the political satire in his  
books, then we may be talking about another author.

> Besides, what the audience wants to read is modern and postmodern  
> satire and not some worn out Victorian character driven plot.

I'm not too sure that Pynchon is over concerned with what people want  
to read. If he did he'd be Dan Brown with more florid descriptive  
passages. A lot more prolific too, I'd bet.

> Pynchon is a cartoonist.

Agreed.

> His characters are not targets and they are not Victorian real.

Nope. Years of Chuck Jones and "that useful substance" obviously took  
their toll ; )

> And, of course he's interested in normal folk; he's a novelist not  
> an epic poet, but the folk he's interested in are not in his books.

I dunno. Oedipa may have started out "normal" but by the time Lot 49  
is auctioned off, she's turned into some kind of a rare creature. Same  
with Slothrop, same with Prairie, Mason & Dixon, Byron the  
Lightbulb . . .

And there's never any lack of the weirdest of the weird in his novels.  
All them anarchists & nymphomaniacs, pyrotechnicians & quick change  
artists, talking dogs and reading dogs, paranoids, parrots & preterites 
—Seriously, is there any less "normal" character than Archduke Franz  
Ferdinand doing the dozens in AtD? If Pynchon was interested in normal  
folk he'd be one whole hell of a lot more like John Updike.