Prising some Character and Emotion out of Pynchon's Books

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jul 30, 2009, at 12:04 PM, Campbel Morgan wrote:

> That characters can be instructive even though they are heartless
> characters we can't care about seems a difficult argument to make, but
> I'll listen. That the novels, despite having heartless characters,
> have a didactic purpose, are satires, corrective satires with targets
> and advocate specific reform measures that should be implemented, is
> also a diffiuclt argument to make. But not impossible.

Remember that Pynchon's satires tend to be encyclopedic—one might even  
say Menippean—though there are some clear trends. None of the books  
could simply be reduced to a single theme. On the other hand, there  
are recurrent themes. Spying and conspiracy are in all the books. The  
CIA and the military-industrial complex get a special working-over in  
Pynchon's California Trilogy. I guess after getting Top Secret  
clearance at Boeing it's hard to un-see such things as Rocketdyne and  
ARPA, particularly when it's literally in you backyard. When I lived  
in Berkeley, one of I.G. Farben's remnants opened shop up a block  
away, in the form of a Bayer Labs gene-splicing facility. Scary stuff.