COL49 - Chap 2: San Narciso as a circuit board

[Paul Mackin]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joseph Tracy" <brook7 at sover.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2009 12:11 AM
Subject: Re: COL49 - Chap 2: San Narciso as a circuit board


>
> On May 12, 2009, at 12:57 PM, Robin Landseadel wrote:
>
>
>> I suspect that TRP has only so much time to spend on characters,  he's 
>> often more interested in describing the set where the action  is taking 
>> place than dwelling too much on the actors in that space.

> Isn't it just as possible that Pynchon is inherently skeptical about  the 
> very idea of "character", particularly the idea of  character as  a 
> learning process leading to arrival at fulfilled maturity.. I just 
> re-read his preface to 1984 and he talks about the sadness of Julia's 
> conviction that her anarchistic free spirit and her ability to lie  when 
> needed will protect her from internalizing Big Brother's will  and demand 
> for compliance.  He is not hopeful about this kind of  individual 
> resistance. He seems to think that  the right   combination of technology 
> and political power might still enable  totalitarian mind control.  Also 
> Buddhism tends to view the concept  of the unique self and individual 
> character as tending toward the  delusional.  What is character anyway, 
> and how much does it follow  the internal narrative paradigm of western 
> literature? It seems to me  that  Pynchon favors the complexity of 
> experience over the simplicity  of internal gnosis, and the reality of how 
> characters act and speak  and even dream  over the stories that either the 
> character or author  spins in their heads.
>>

But I wish it were otherwise.

My own "internal gnosis" longs to make contact with something equivalent in 
the novels.

P.