V-2 -Chapter 9 - prolegomenon & apologia

[alice wellintown]

I would emphasize, not the author's ambition or intelligence or
idealism or innocence or the bomb and the military industrial
complex's scholarships (Invisible Man's Battle Royal)) and all that
(who are we working?  for stuff that Pynchon plumbs in all of his
works), but the distance from the horror of history here. In other
words, to appreciate the the objective correlatives in this chapter we
should go tacking with William Carlos Williams's Yachts, with Eliot,
Poe, Conrad and, of course, the Herero history.  Pynchon gave this a
go in "The Secret Integration" but he failed to make his Jazz Man a
character because he was too taken with dreams and intoxicating
streams of un-consciousness. Here, Sarah, for example, is way off
young P's list of tourists; she's nothing he has experienced.


On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 3:37 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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.
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> ----- 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."
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