V-2 -Chapter 9 - prolegomenon & apologia

[Mark Kohut]

When o'erwhelming intelligence and massive idealism filled with American 
innocence and 
wrapped in huge ambition
feels deeply "The Horror!, The Horror!" of History.............

we can get a rounded objective correlative of a character.

I guess.





----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, October 10, 2010 2:17:54 PM
Subject: Re: V-2 -Chapter 9 - prolegomenon & apologia

>
> Whatever doomsday paranoia ripples through these books laid before us to
> eat, that paranoia was born from the author's personal experience. If
> Mondaugen's story resonates, perhaps it would be due to the author's easy
> identification with Mondaugen and how easy it could have been for the young
> author to have followed him down that path..

Identification is difficult to argue, but Mondaugen is the best drawn
of Pynchon's early characters and the the reason for this not hard to
find: he is the easiest to draw.  "Good characters" are not easy to
draw. "Bad characters" are not so difficult to draw. Anyone who has
given the sullen craft a whirl know this. To make a character, not to
identify with one. but to make one worse than oneself, one need only
let the bad passions, that from the quotidian and mundane stings and
sorrows of ordinary fortune, and from the bumps and bruises of the
blind battering the blind ...are always there waiting to be put to
good use in a "bad character."