Does the Broken Estate Have a Heart?

[John Bailey]

I find Pynchon's notion of character very attractive, since I have yet
to meet a fully-rounded and complete character myself. They're all
Becomings, inextricable from their landscape (that bit someone quoted
today from AtD sums this up perfectly) and they're not the tragic
clockwork automatons that V. wishes to become. His characters, like
his earth, are alive, and I think he likes to create characters that
are fountains of possibility rather than ever-narrowing channels of
destiny. His last three works have specifically explored the notion of
time and fate in relation to "character" and if there's a nostalgia
there, surely it's for a world when time's arrow didn't fly so
all-powerfully true.

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 6:37 PM, Rob Jackson<jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> On 24/07/2009, at 5:00 PM, pynchon-l-digest wrote:
>
>>> his weakness for character
>
> This is one of those long-standing misapprehensions of Pynchon's work which
> is all too often mindlessly recycled imho. M&D, which is the twin peak in
> Pynchon's oeuvre, and perhaps might even one day come to be the Everest to
> GR's K2, is a character-driven masterpiece. ... And the psychological depth
> which a great many of the more prominent characters in Pynchon's works
> possess - think of Pointsman and Weissmann/Blicero in GR, Roger and
> Tchitcherine ... some of the female characters too, Katje, Frenesi, even
> Oedipa - is something that Pynchon labours long and hard to achieve, and
> extremely successfully, too. All that stuff about Pavlov and Pierre Janet
> and transmarginal stimuli in GR betrays a very real interest in the human
> psyche - as well as intensive research into theories thereof - which
> manifests in the novel as literary technique just as strongly as it does as
> theme.
>
> As for the realism/postmodernism nexus, the layers of detritus upon
> Slothrop's desk are as close to mimesis as you're ever likely to get in a
> postmodernist novel, but it's the splicing of these realist impulses with
> the zaniness and cartoon capers and narrative abreactions, and the
> disorientating effect that this has on the reader, that exemplifies this
> particular strand of postmodernism.
>
>> From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: Does the Broken Estate Have a Heart?
>>
>> Campbel Morgan wrote:
>>>
>>> He certainly doesn't value the picaresque tradition that Pynchon and
>>> other hysterical realists have pushed, with  manic post-millenialsm
>>> and purring prose, to the exhaustion of any possible, insert several
>>> subjunctive clauses here, reading.
>>
>> James Wood said an interesting thing in his review of Against the Day:
>> "Many things can be said against this writer, but no one has ever
>> accused him of lacking talent. (It may be that he has too much.)"
>
> I agree with Terrance-on-summer-break's take on Wood's attitude to Pynchon,
> and I think it's what Wood doesn't like about the genre that "we"* do like.
> (* I think that Pynchon's point about "we-systems" in GR is that by their
> very nature they inevitably and automatically become a "they-system"; like
> Niels Bohr's Complementarity Principle it's whether you're cold and lonely
> on the outside looking in or safe and cozy on the inside looking out that
> makes all the difference ... they're just like "excluded middles", to be
> avoided at all costs ... and that's one of the reasons why "anarchy" seems
> to hold such a fascination and bittersweet appeal for the author ... But I
> digress.)
>
> I think that what Wood is admitting here is that he does admire and respect
> Pynchon's literary "talent", very much so, but that it sometimes spills over
> into self-indulgence and becomes art - or  "mindless pleasure" - for its own
> sake. And I think that this is where M&D has the edge on GR, because the
> vision and the style and the construction of it have been so
> carefully-orchestrated, it has a unity of purpose, a more even tempo and
> momentum ... there are far fewer bum notes than in GR ... it's an audacious
> work, Pynchon's attempt to identify and describe and trace the beginnings of
> "the tradition of America" ...
>
> ... but I gotta say ... by the time I got to about page 450 of AtD and was
> served up yet another of those "something which was almost but not quite
> like something else" teases I threw the damn brick of hot air that was
> "almost but not quite like" a novel across the damn room "that was almost
> but not ..." yada yada ...
>
> best regards
>
>
>