P's farcical figures: small, short lived, flat.

[alice wellintown]

The cartoon characters, as Brian McHale, in his wondewrful essay on
Vineland, "Zapping", demonstrates, can't be ignored. Cartooning, in
Vineland, because it is TV saturated, is a fairly important authorial
technique. And, P uses it before and after VL. GR is full of cartooning,
though it is film and not TV that saturates that major work.

On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 6:52 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

>
> P stuffs his works with these figures. Other major authors, Dickens is
> usually mentioned, have done the same. Call them cartoons, if you prefer,
> but to argue that cartoons, minor, flat, short lived characters are a
> weakness is silly. While P is not Dickens, is not a 19th century author, so
> his characters are not really Dickensian, they are, as are the figures in
> Dickens's novels, comic figures. Like flat cartoon characters, we get
> balloons of their thoughts, often from a narrative voice that assumes a
> voice, a diction, tone to fit the character. This is not that difficult for
> an author, not one of P's talent, certainly. It does, however, challange
> the reader. So, we have a novelist making cartoons to strut and fret an
> hour of farce on the vaudeville, some of this is, given th corny, juvenile,
> quirky sense of humor it mimics and mocks, parodies, and stylizes, and the
> author's penchant for puerile puns and goofy adolescent dry humping the
> blow up dolls under the bed while the orchestra plays a kazoo requiem for a
> falling body that splats on the sidewalk on that sacred day...and...why
> take offense or get defensive...or serious....it's only a figure of farce?
>
> Does not a farce figure bleed?
> P is a Shylark!
> He got my pound of death. I wish he didn't get my dollars for the stones
> he bled with his edges.
>
>
>
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