#44: Larry's Parents and Grandparents

[alice wellintown]

What is so innovative and experimental is how the characters are
constructed/deconstructed, not with the conventional or traditional
method, not with description, what characters say, do, think and feel
only, but with palimpsest and pastiche and parody, not only of paper
texts but of the confluence and loomings of books, films, TV,
rich-media, and the actors, and so on.

So, when we read Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter and Hester is described,
as seen from the perspective of a Papist looking at artistic
renderings of the Divine Maternity, then from the perspective of a
"sensitive observer" as walking in the shoes and steps of the "sainted
Ann Hutchinson" and then, from the perspective of the author's own
ancestors and his own guilty purging as a witch, we are still reading
a conventional and traditional, though exceptional and experimental
use of characterization in American Romance, but P, writing some 159
years later has pushed these conventions to their appropriate
postmodernist limits.

Nothing wrong with the family, but they are and are not a family.
Pynchon's comic mode, I would argue--and this is why I posted from
Melville's Repose, is quite dark and romantic.

On 10/4/09, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I don't understand your problem with Elmina and Leo.   Homer and Marge are
> pretty likable, too, in their own way - people have watched them for years.
>   Somehow I can't see the portrayal of the Sportellos as being "the most
> innovative experimentation of the author."    Leo and Elmina are a nice
> touch - they're homey and it's satirized and it's okay with me.   They add a
>  personal and human dimension to the character of Doc - he's more grounded
> or something.   ("Hippies did not issue forth from the north side of trees"
> - that sort of thing.)
>
> Bekah