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

[Campbel Morgan]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 6:03 PM, Robin Landseadel <
robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> 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.


Like Dickens, Pynchon loads his works with more characters than the reader
can possibly follow.  In Dickens's works the odd names helped
readers remember them as they came and left and came back again. The novels
were also published in serial form so odd names and other odd
characteristics helped folks remember the crowd that Dickens marched out
onto the stage.

The names in Pynchon's works don't function like this because his characters
fade out or pop in or up or down or are recycled, and we don't need to know
most of them and we don't much care. Unless we're reading Pynchon as we
would a Victorian novel, and that makes little sense.

>
>
> 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.


But we can't place much value on cartoons that fade out or morph. And that's
one reason why we can't read Pynchon as people read Dickens.

>
>
> 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.
>

But they are so simple and obvious. There must be something better to keep
us reading. Not characters. Not themes. Maybe Hamlet said it best, The Play
is the thing....


>
> While the author admires Orwell, he doesn't write satires like Orwell's
>> satires.
>>
>
> He's too busy writing satires like Pynchon's satires.


Right.

>
>
> 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.


Political satire doesn't have any staying power. It's targets, the
interesting ones anyway, go away. We don't read A Modest Proposal because
Irish children look good on a table. They are doing just fine. We read it
because of its form; for how it does what it does. The big targets are
always there and are hit by every guy or gal with ink and a sling. If
Pynchon wants to write political satire he could turn something out
everyday. He wants to make art. He thinks he's great at what he does. He has
good reason to believe that he is quite a gigted artist. Politics and
history are on the table, but the baked baby with gravy is his art.

>
>
> 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.


He can only do what he does. He can't do Dan Brown.

>
>
> 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 . . .


Pynchon's carnival cartoons are not folks, his readers are.

>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
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