Today's debate question

Wed Dec 23 09:23:50 CST 2015

JB> Pynchon's books don't seem to require *any* identification with his
characters, I
reckon, but I love that their ambition is so much broader than that. They
invoke a compassion for humanity and existence and the complicated world
without confusing that with caring for a handful of fictional puppets. That
seems a harder task than throwing up a bunch of interesting and flawed
individuals who eventually have something bad happen to them and we go
"ohhhh nooooo" and somehow that makes us better people.

I like this very much -- snark and all -- as a counterposition to Wood's
notorious footnote in How Fiction Works:

JW> To my mind, this is also a weakness with a certain kind of postmodern
novel -- say Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day -- still in love with the
rapid, farcelike, overlit simplicities of Fielding. There is nothing more
eighteenth-century than Pynchon’s love of picaresque plot accumulation; his
mockery of pedantry, which is at the same time a love of pedantry; his
habit of making his flat characters dance for a moment on stage and then
whisking them away; his vaudevillian fondness for silly names, japes,
mishaps, disguises, silly errors, and so on. There are pleasures to be had
from these amiable, peopled canvases, and there are passages of great
beauty, but, as in farce, the cost to final seriousness is considerable:
everyone is ultimately protected from real menace because no one really
exists. The massive turbines of the incessant story-making produce so much
noise that no one can be heard. The Nazi Captain Blicero in Gravity’s
Rainbow, or the ruthless financier Scarsdale Vibe in Against the Day, are
not truly frightening figures, because they are not true figures. But
Gilbert Osmond, Herr Naphta, Peter Verkhovensky, and Conrad’s anarchist
professor are very frightening indeed.

I admire and respect Wood, but this deployment of "simplicities" and
"pleasures" vs. "seriousness" and "true figures" stacks the deck. We all
want to be grownups, right? To engage with serious truth, not mindless
pleasures?

It's Forster's weary "Yes–oh, dear, yes–the novel tells a story"... or for
that matter, Gustav berating Saure Bummer: "people like you!... an entire
opera house crammed full of them right up to standing room, they’re
doddering in the aisles, hanging off the tops of the highest balconies, and
you know what they’re all listening to, Säure? eh? They’re all listening to
Rossini! Sitting there drooling away to some medley of predictable little
tunes, leaning forward elbows on knees muttering, ‘C’mon, c’mon then
Rossini, let’s get all this pretentious fanfare stuff out of the way, let’s
get on to the real good tunes!’"

Listen to your Webern, dammit, it's good for you.

What Wood misses -- or at any rate, grossly undervalues -- is exactly
the "compassion
for humanity and existence and the complicated world" which runs through
and drives all the japery. To me, Blicero *is* terrifying because he makes
me see -- no, *feel*  -- how German idealism and Rilke and back-to-nature
Wandervogel youth culture (all of which I'm drawn to, *want* to like) also
greased the skids to the Nazi abyss. Pynchon does that *not* by making
Blicero "round," by making me say "Gosh, I've *known* people like that,"
but by building so much history, sexuality, ideology, mythology, racism,
usw into him and his threads of the narrative.

"Compassion for... the complicated world" -- yes. Pynchon's truth and life
grow out of context as much as character, surround as much as foreground.
Look again at the condescension in Wood's "amiable, peopled canvases": I'd
love to hear him talk about portraits from Rembrandt to Bacon, but I don't
think he gets Bruegel or Bosch. Or Pynchon.

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 6:20 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't tend to read much fiction where identification is that
> important, although I place a high value on empathy. Pynchon's books
> don't seem to require *any* identification with his characters, I
> reckon, but I love that their ambition is so much broader than that.
> They invoke a compassion for humanity and existence and the
> complicated world without confusing that with caring for a handful of
> fictional puppets. That seems a harder task than throwing up a bunch
> of interesting and flawed individuals who eventually have something
> bad happen to them and we go "ohhhh nooooo" and somehow that makes us
> better people. Which is 99.9% of the 'literary fiction' read and
> discussed in my country...
>
> Although that kind of fiction absolutely has its place, just not in my
> cold heart.
>
> On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 6:19 AM, Perry Noid <coolwithdoc at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Well I'm not sure I know how to debate this. But I've noticed some
> > resonances with the beginning of 2666 by Roberto Bolaño; the motivations
> of
> > the four readers of the same author.
> >
> >
> > On Tuesday, December 22, 2015, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> Sort of reminds me of computer assisted text analysis.
> >>
> >> Apropos of nothing but  had to post it.
> >>
> >> I think the "autistic analyst" is a good figure of speech.
> >>
> >> The computer's the idiot savant.
> >>
> >> Without the empathizing reader, it's a pretty bleak proposition all
> >> around.
> >>
> >> I'm not saying don't do it, but it's way secondary.
> >>
> >> Dispassionate analysis, I'm talking about.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 11:27 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Yeahp, nice response. I called it a debate question for this reason.
> >>> Let me try to frame 'the other perspective".
> >>>
> >>> Literature, including drama and (most) poetry is about Life, "life and
> >>> life only--Dylan" in ways most disciplines are not. The distancing of
> >>> Logic; science, even the objectivity of the scientific method are not
> >>> necessary to it. Our common--and uncommon humanity IS. That humanity
> >>> remains abstract and distant unless we can feel it just as our own
> >>> emotions---some say our own thoughts even (!)--are reguired to
> >>> understand our human feelings, our humanity.
> >>> Without being able to identify with the words, scenes and characters
> >>> in any work of literature we are as good as autistic. Perhaps a savant
> >>> but ultimately clueless to what matters in Literature.
> >>>
> >>> On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 11:01 AM, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com>
> >>> wrote:
> >>> > I see what you’re saying Mark but I still have to disagree with the
> >>> > broadness of your statement.    Whether or not a reader’s
> identification
> >>> > with the characters is a good thing or not depends on what she/he’s
> reading
> >>> > - furthermore,  reading on one level does not eliminate other
> levels.  -
> >>> > Also,  what does “identify” mean in this case?  As far as I can
> think,
> >>> > identification is a range with “knowing someone like that” on one
> end  ->
> >>> > “caring about”  a character being in the middle range -  and becoming
> >>> > "psychologically enmeshed with a character” on the rather intense
> end.
> >>> >
> >>> > This is good about the more intense identification:
> >>> > http://www.salon.com/2012/05/17/can_you_identify/
> >>> > Includes books like On the Road (Kerouac) and The Sorrows of Young
> >>> > Werther (von Goethe) goes on to contemporary homosexual and racial
> stuff.
> >>> > **
> >>> > Also from today in Nebraska re Snoopy the comic strip - the lighter
> >>> > "knowing someone like that” -:
> >>> >
> >>> >
> http://www.kearneyhub.com/opinions/hubcolumns/lori_potter/we-identify-with-characters-in-peanuts/article_6b6891c0-9a9e-11e5-a9e8-a79105d8c36f.html
> >>> >
> >>> > Charles Schulz and his “Peanuts” comic strip kids had been fixtures
> in
> >>> > daily newspapers since 1952, but their popularity soared after
> people saw “A
> >>> > Charlie Brown Christmas.”
> >>> >
> >>> > I was age 9 in 1965, so my friends and I were pretty much like
> Charlie
> >>> > Brown and his friends. Or at least we knew other kids who seemed
> like them.
> >>> >
> >>> > Some identified with the inept Charlie Brown, who couldn’t fly a
> kite,
> >>> > kick a football or win a baseball game. Others may have thought our
> teachers
> >>> > and other adults sounded like “wah-wah-wah.”
> >>> >
> >>> > We knew bossy girls like Lucy. For any Wilcox classmates who thought
> I
> >>> > was one of them, let me set the record straight. I’ve always been
> >>> > judgmental, not bossy.
> >>> >
> >>> > I was a Peppermint Patty tomboy who played sports with the boys at
> >>> > recess decades before most Americans thought it was OK for girls to
> do “boy
> >>> > things” and vice versa.
> >>> >
> >>> > I salute the boys who let me play and risked the shame of losing to a
> >>> > girl.
> >>> >
> >>> > We loved Linus’ innocence and understood why it was so hard for him
> to
> >>> > give up his security blanket. We admired the talents of Schroeder,
> the piano
> >>> > prodigy, and thought it would be cool to have a happy-go-lucky,
> dream-big,
> >>> > drama-loving dog like Snoopy.
> >>> >
> >>> > ****
> >>> > ME >  I personally identified with Charlie Brown and that’s kind of
> >>> > cool because he’s a boy. (I’ve identified with other males though so
> it’s
> >>> > not that big a deal.) Know any males like Lucy?  That’s called “Men
> Explain
> >>> > Things to Me.”  - lol -  My big identification thing was Jo in
> Little Women
> >>> > and Nancy Drew -  (good role model stuff there, imo.)
> >>> >
> >>> > We identify because we know folks like that - and it works well for
> >>> > adult readers in satire and tear-jerkers and anti-war movies and so
> on.
> >>> > Some folks identify to the extent of losing themselves in the
> emotions of
> >>> > the character (escape romances?)  ->   After many years of reading
> many
> >>> > books in many groups with many people,  I think some women tend to
> enjoy
> >>> > identifying with characters more than other folks (both sexes) do.
> And
> >>> > those women who do place importance on the identification factor
> enjoy
> >>> > reading books that are aimed at that.   Do men identify with the
> guys in war
> >>> > novels?  (I have no idea.)  These books aren’t that great imo but
> they sell
> >>> > well.
> >>> >
> >>> > In Pynchon’s books I’ve identified with some of the women characters
> -
> >>> > a couple in AtD,  CoL49 a little bit,
> >>> > Bek
> >>> >
> >>> >
> >>> >> On Dec 22, 2015, at 1:57 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>> >>
> >>> >> Proposition: That reading by identification with a character
> condemns
> >>> >> the reading to be second-rate most of the time. The major reason:
> it reduces
> >>> >> the sensibility of the writer, whose sensibility is supposed to be
> richer
> >>> >> than ours ( most of the time) but which at least is Other than
> ours....
> >>> >>
> >>> >> To ours. The vaunted empathy is crippled; the genius of observation
> >>> >> and imagination is lost. The reading is ultimately solipsistic.
> >>> >>
> >>> >> Sent from my iPad-
> >>> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >>> >
> >>> -
> >>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> >>
> >>
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20151223/5e1e4b88/attachment.html>