Prising some Character and Emotion out of Pynchon's Books

[Michael Bailey]

Emotions and Characters in Pynchon
a personal rumination

Part 2: PAL (purpose, agenda, limits)

Purpose: After having placed reading within the world, and fiction
within reading; after having paid homage to the storytelling tradition
and placed myself as an ardent consumer and amateur (see part 1), in a
series of posts kept brief in order to minimize the exposure of my
ignorance, I hope to build a slight critical structure (maybe a
lean-to) under which I hope to shelter my surprise that character and
emotion aren't seen as major elements of Pynchon's books.  Sure,
there's a lot of other handles to grab it by, but honestly, for me his
fiction, like all fiction, is all about the characters and emotions.

Agenda: plucking from memory the characters and emotions that
impressed me deeply enough not to have to look them up, I'll engage 3
books gently and sympathetically and briefly.

1) Necessary gruntwork: briefly define character, define emotion (for
my purposes here)

2)  V.
a) characters - author as character (just to get it out of the way);
Benny, Stencil, Paola, Rachel
    i) Pig and Sphere and Schoenmaker and Eigenvalue
    ii) as a token that I'm aware just how non-rigorous this is, only
one sentence on V. herself
b) reader as character: my emotions while reading (just to introduce
that and back off it hurriedly)
c) the emotions that one might suppose the book is trying to evoke

3) Gravity's Rainbow
a) the Kirghiz Light episode (as an example of emotion)
b) Slothrop (an example of character)

4) Vineland
a) Zoyd
b) the people that aren't in it
c) emotions: they're all over the place

5) Plus/Delta - the traditional finish to a PAL. Self criticism.

Limits: 1 post for each numbered point