Character (WAS: COL49 - Chap 2: San Narciso as a circuit board)

[rich]

We also find the emphasis on character even earlier, in some of the blurbs
Pynchon wrote back in the 70s. In 1979 he praises Phyllis Gebauer's 'The
Pagan Blessing' for its "characters who are alive and engaging," in 1975
he lauds M. F. Beal's 'Amazon One' for "tak[ing] you into the lives
of people you can care about and believe in," and in 1970 he sez that
Marge Piercy's 'Dance the Eagle to Sleep' has "the best set of characters
since Moby Dick or something."
________________
one wonders what Pynchon thought when he was sent or read Mao II for
the first time and which he blurbed

rich

On 5/14/09, Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Joseph Tracy:
>
>> 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.[...]
>> What is character anyway, and how much does it follow the internal
>> narrative paradigm of western literature?
>
> I would have to agree: This is how Pynchon writes in his novels. Yet it
> is interesting to compare his actual practice with his non-fiction
> reflections
> on character. When he disparages "Entropy" in his introduction to Slow
> Learner,
> for instance, he writes:
>
> "The story is a fine example of a procedural error beginning writers
> are always being cautioned against. It is simply wrong to begin with a
> theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force
> characters and events to conform to it."
>
> And this idea is echoed in a letter to Charles Hollander from 1981 which
> was recently up for auction (it sold for 14,400 dollars!):
>
> "[...] I don't write "novels of ideas."Plot and character come first, just
> like with most other folk's stuff, and the heavy thotz and capitalized
> references and shit are in there to advance action, set scenes, fill in
> characters and so forth, and the less of it I have to do, the better for
> me cause I'm lazy."
>
> We also find the emphasis on character even earlier, in some of the blurbs
> Pynchon wrote back in the 70s. In 1979 he praises Phyllis Gebauer's 'The
> Pagan Blessing' for its "characters who are alive and engaging," in 1975
> he lauds M. F. Beal's 'Amazon One' for "tak[ing] you into the lives
> of people you can care about and believe in," and in 1970 he sez that
> Marge Piercy's 'Dance the Eagle to Sleep' has "the best set of characters
> since Moby Dick or something."
>
> So the idea of character surely means a lot to Pynchon, at least if we are
> to take his non-fiction reflections at all seriously. It's not hard to see
> some sort of internal struggle going on here: Pynchon desperately wanting
> to stay with his characters, but constantly being pulled in the direction of
> "the heavy thotz and capitalized references and shit."
> _________________________________________________________________
> Drag n’ drop—Get easy photo sharing with Windows Live™ Photos.
>
> http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowslive/products/photos.aspx
>