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

[Mark Kohut]

It is nice to have a counterforce, so to speak, to keep this list from being just a fan club.

Pynchon's names do function like Dickens' characters, I suggest.
I think it is deeply important that some characters, like Slothrup most memorably, disappear. Simplistically: the fate of the/some human being(s) in the modern world, perhaps?

A--and many of TRPs characters are in different books.

P's satires, like Dickens', are of the politics of the whole world and of America within it; of History as we have created it; of modernism, that juggernaut, as it created us. "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind"---Emerson. 

And, my boring repeated drumbeat is: P has a full, deep vision of what is---would be--- "the good life" ---in Aristotle's sense, in many an artist's sense, that pervades the details of his books. 

Themes can be easy---TRPs aren't so; he is a profound social/historical 'critic'---but embodying them is all. 

His embodiment sings. 




--- On Tue, 7/14/09, Campbel Morgan <campbelmorgan at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Campbel Morgan <campbelmorgan at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: C of L 49: "That's how it is..most of the time."
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Tuesday, July 14, 2009, 9:49 PM
> 
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>