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

[Joseph Tracy]

  It is good to hear these thoughts from Pynchon and others.  I may  
certainly be wrong about the influence of Buddhism on how he treats  
character.  I am more than skeptical that these are not novels of  
ideas and equally skeptical that he is lazy.  I do think he takes  
character seriously and that his characters are credibly consistent.  
I think the criticism of flatness is overstated and has to do with  
how much people stay the same in terms of fundamental character.    
M&D is the only book that follows protagonists through long periods  
of life and to me they stand out as  fully developed characters by  
any measure.  What I find most different about his character  
development is that we know his characters most through their names,  
what they do, what they don't do, and what they say rather than what  
they think.

I also think people seriously underestimate the importance of plot in  
Pynchon.

Is there a copy online of the Hollander letter?
On May 14, 2009, at 4:53 PM, rich wrote:

> 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."
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