V-2nd - 2: Who's your favorite Pynchonian character?

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jun 30, 2010, at 11:38 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> I suspect that when you guys are talkin bout narrative voices, points
> of view, storytelling and what not. . .you know that these are not
> character. . .  and that bringing characters to life, though narrative
> (one of the four elements of characterization--1. act, 2. speak, 3.
> think and feel, 4. described) is better discussed under the formal
> term, style and that P's style in V., and in the early essays and slow
> learner stories, is still raw--the influence and anxiety of Modernism,
> from, as Mark noted, Adams, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, and
> from the American Romance--Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, Brown, and of
> course, the new and novel experimentors in the quest and picaresque
> genres, all used a parodic material (e.g., Benny is an On The Road
> wondering scholar-- Dean Moriarty / Adams who learns nothing and is
> unchanged by his adventure On This Other Side of Paradise
> (Fitzgerald). Style is what you like in the voice in the sentences and
> syntax, the odd turns of phrases and clauses that run on into pauses
> and digressions and allusions that tingle and tangle into
> progressively.

Uh, no . . .

"character" is also affect or attitude but more to the point,  
"character" also address the notions of more or less "rounded" or at  
the very least remotely plausible representations of recognizable  
human behavior, of which there aren't too many in the loose bowels of  
our Auteur's canon. On the other hand this/these narrators, this quick- 
change artist relaying these implausible events via impersonations of  
the voices of that implausible time, this stoned fabulist—I'd like to  
know him, whoever he may be. And whoever this/these character/ers may  
be they are not the author, these voices are fictional creations.