Does the Broken Estate Have a Heart?

[Campbel Morgan]

Chrarterization: the means authors employ to show and tell the reader
what characters are like.

At its simplest: WHat characters say, do or fail to do, think, feel,
dream, and descriptions of the character.

Again, Thomas C. Foster's work is handy and useful; objects, images,
places, ideas are associated with characters and ideas about
characters. Some of that is the author's doing and some of it the
reader's doing.

P asks a lot of his readers; the reader has to do a lot of heavy
lifting. Many stong readers can not or will not finish a P novel. In
one of my book clubs we tried Faulker's S&F and failed; Morrison's
Beloved was not a success. Pynchon would be cruel and unusual
punishment. I gave copies of CL49 to several very strong readers and,
while they finished it, they hated it. What's going on? Is it that
they don't like having their Modern reading skills, their conventional
reading habits thwarted by a postmodern genius?

Readers don't/can't/won't get it. Readers who read War & Peace, all of
Dumas, Dostoyevsky, DeLillo, Woolf, Joyce, French postmodern fiction
in French, Gaddis, Wallace, Nabokov ... critical theory, watch
Fellini's 8 1/2, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, read complex studies in
genetics, in Astro-physics, can do complex math without a calculator.
Smart people, big readers, people who  Why not?

They are not willing to do the heavy lifting because it's not worth
it. It's not just the density, the florid prose, the historical
cyber-punking, the romping across the encylopedia universe, off the
grid, off the map, boldy out where even hitchhikers have no guide.
It's a combination of these and the characters that don't have hearts
and don't get ours beating for them. Nabokov's HH has a heart, it's
black, but we love him. He's soooo interesting. Mason has one. Dixon
too. But most of the others don't or if they do we need a microscope
and a stethoscope to find and listen to it.

That P's characters are invested, participate, internalize,
externalize with their environments is certainly true. Like Miss
Havisham or Mr. McChokumchild or Lady Deadlock or Mr. Gradgrind. But
these characters are not meant to be fleshed out like Pip or Joe or
Little Dorrit.

None of P's characters are meant to be fleshed out. That's why they
have no hearts and we, the dear readers, as dear as we may be or as
dear as investment in reading his books may be, can not give them
hearts.



On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 1:55 PM, Paul Mackin<mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Campbel Morgan"
> <campbelmorgan at gmail.com>
> To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Friday, July 24, 2009 4:15 AM
> Subject: Does the Broken Estate Have a Heart?
>
>
>> This passage, provided by John,  fails to convince this reader.
>
> I thinik it's going to take a lot more energy than has so far been expended
> to fully explain what people mean when they say Pynchon books don't have
> heart.
>
> Because numerous passages  always can be immediately cited  showing heart
> coming veritably out one's ass.
>
> I think the key however  may be he question of whose heart strings are
> really being pulled--the character's or the reader's.
>
> Pynchon often seems to me to be saying, look,  here's some pure pognancy for
> you, and we sit back and agree most  defrintely yes wiping away the tears.
> But what do the characters do? (if they've been hurt do they try to get
> even)
>
> Or another example, look at  the way there two completely opposite character
> types go hand and hand through life together.
>
> In other words it seems all too much like what we are getting are examples
> of strong emotion or of strong character development.
>
> To me there is something missing.
>
> Maybe it's indefinable.
>
> But probably if someone would take the trouble they could nail it.
>
> Humbly. because I'm not the one to do the job.
>
> P
>
>