Pynchon's Quest Narratives ...

[Paul Mackin]

This excerpt contains pretty close to what I meant when I wrote that Pynchon 
tends to give us examples of characters and their feelings rather than the 
characters themselves.

We can still take his characters seriously (or often not), but more as ideas 
(often funny ideas) than as characters.

And of course there's so much irony--a 'real' character can't be too ironic. 
(he can be sort of ironic)

I'm speaking of tendencies, not catagorically. There are are always 
exceptions. No formulations are perfect.

P

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Monroe" <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, July 26, 2009 11:00 AM
Subject: Pynchon's Quest Narratives ...


> From Deborah L. Madsen, "Pynchon's Quest Narratives and the Tradition
> of American Romance," Approaches to Teaching Pynchon's The Crying of
> Lot 49 and Other Works , ed. Thomas H, Schaub (NY: MLA, 2008), pp.
> 25-30:
>
>   "Students who have never studied American literature as a coherent
> body of knowledge evaluate Pynchon's achievement in terms of their
> familiarity with the canon of British literature.  Consequently, their
> perception of what constitutes a novel in English is shaped by the
> classic nineteenth-century British novelists ....  Thus, these
> students anticipate that Pynchon's language will conform loosely to
> E.M. Forster's prescription for 'round' or 'flat' characterization and
> who will inhabit fictonal settings recognizably related to the world
> ....  The structure of the narrative, they expect, will be based on
> the interaction of characters and the development of relationships
> among them that represent significant aspects of their culture and
> society.
>   "Given these assumptions, students encounter difficulties with
> Pynchon's deployment of the quest structure, his use of language and
> symbolism, his types of characters, and their settings.  Richard
> Chase, in his classic study, The American Novel and Its Tradition
> (1957), observes that differences such as these mark American as
> opposed to English novelistic conventions.... Chase identifies what he
> calls the American 'romance-novel,' a generic classification that
> accounts for the distinctive features of the narratives that form much
> of the American literary canon: works by James Fenimore Cooper,
> Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and ... Thomas Pynchon.
>   "Chase stresses the importance of a shift in the attitude toward
> characterization: from the novelistic emphasis on comprehensive
> characterization to the romancer's interest in action and plot at the
> expense of detailed character portrayal.  'Character itself,' he
> writes, 'becomes ... somewhat abstract and ideal, so much so in some
> romances that it seems merely a function of plot' (13) [ellipsis in
> text].'  ..." (p. 25)
>
>   "The subject matter of the quest romance is abstract moral truth
> ... as opposed to more particular sociological kinds of truth that
> arise from the ordinary or probable experiences in the novel.  As a
> consequence, the romance is set not in the recognizable world of real
> life but in some neutral space where the marvelous and the ordinary,
> the imaginary events and actual locations may meet.  The laws of
> possibility are suspended ... so that the truths of human experience
> may be acted out in the narrative.... the highly stylized, fictional
> world of the romance: all is symbolic, but the symbolic meetings are
> not simple and obvious; rather, they are as ambiguous as the human
> situations being represented." (p. 26)
>
> "When a romance is read as a novel, inevitably the romancer's attempt
> to dramatize the hidden truths of the human condition becomes but a
> weak 'paint and pasteboard' representation of social reality....  Like
> Hawthorne, Pynchon creates characters to represent moral ideas, just
> as he uses social history ... as idea rather than as event." (ibid.)
>
> "Indeed, several of the features that supposedly define Lot 49 and
> other Pynchon works as postmodern are actually characteristics of the
> American quest romance: the self-conscious foregrounding of narrative,
> the infinite deferral of meaning, the self-reflexive concern with
> reading and textuality...." (p. 30)
>
> http://www.mla.org/store/CID23/PID336
>
> Citing ...
>
> Chase, Richard.  The American Novel and its Tradition.
>   London: Bell, 1957.  [Baltimore, MD: JHUP, 1980.]
>
> Forster, E.M.  Aspects of the Novel.  London: Arnold, 1927.
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=vzBtSnA4rLAC