COL49 - Chap 2: San Narciso as a circuit board

[Mark Kohut]

Yeah......And if he thinks "the human [being]" has been diminished/lost since ?????, then whither [human] character in fiction?



----- Original Message ----
From: Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at gmail.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2009 11:09:32 AM
Subject: Re: COL49 - Chap 2: San Narciso as a circuit board


----- 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.