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

[rich]

Pynchon wrote a letter to Hollander?
I was not aware

On 5/14/09, malignd at aol.com <malignd at aol.com> wrote:
> He's either putting Hollander on or he's deluded.  He's certainly not
> describing what he writes.
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com>
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Sent: Thu, 14 May 2009 3:52 am
> Subject: Character (WAS: COL49 - Chap 2: San Narciso as a circuit board)
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> 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 sce
> nes, 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."
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