M & D Deep Duck continues.

[Monte Davis]

[Inadvertently not-replied-ALL  earlier to Mark K]

One big reason "flat vs. rounded" caught on is that it meshes so nicely
with the history (or a hazy recollection of the history) of perspective in
painting and drawing:

Once upon a time we had only mosaics and Byzantine icons and the Bayeux
tapestry; then some geniuses in Florence or Germany or the Low Countries
found the vanishing point (with or without nifty gridded screens and
camerae obscurae). After that, artists were able to represent the world as
we really see it! (Until photography came along to do that better, which
liberated artists into abstraction. )

Similarly, thanks to Shakespeare [or Lady Murasaki or whoever], fiction --
but especially European prose fiction, and extra-special-especially the
English realistic novel -- developed unparalleled ways to portray human
nature and character as it really is! (Until modernist/postmodernist
fiction, which etc.)

The trouble is, that analogy falls apart if you think hard for five minutes
about all the important differences between (1) how we look at and
interpret an image, (2) how we become familiar with and interact with other
people in our lives, and (3) how we mentally construct and form
expectations of "a character" from black marks on wood pulp -- plus a big
bag of conventions we've collected starting with Three Little Pigs and
Goodnight Moon.

E.g. that "Innocent merriment" thread: very early in our introduction to
Mason (15) we learn that he's a habitue of the Friday hangings at Tyburn,
"though without his precise reason for it." Followed by frequent
brushstrokes adding to the portrait of a death- and ghost-preoccupied,
grieving widower. Followed, on St. Helena (109-111), by

(1) the most explicit timelined link between Rebekah's death and Mason's
Friday habit... [Aha! we were right!]...

And (2) "Tyburn Charlie," who attended "expressly to chat up women" because
public hangings make the ladies horny and the guest of honor hard...

And (3) before we have a moment to say [Aha! what a hypocrite and/or deeply
ambivalent PTSD case], the advisement that Mason attended "upon a number of
assumptions, many of which would not widely be regarded as sane."

Uhh...well... Aha?????

Maybe the assumption that he might see a soul in flight from the body?

Maybe the assumption that Florinda & co would be more complaisant there
than any Wapping doxy?

Maybe our suddenly revised assumption that Mason's behavior with Johanna
Vroom and her daughters in Capetown -- a celibate (?) repeatedly putting
himself into sexually charged situations -- was not after all an anomaly
caused by too much mutton in his diet?

Maybe Pynchon's assumption that we'll learn to connect the dots between
"without his precise reason" and the equally unspecified "assumptions which
would not widely be regarded as sane," 85 pages later (with more such
non-explanations to come)-- and realize that he's fucking with us on a
grand, highly structured scale?

If Miss Michiko wants to pat Pynchon on the head for making Mason a
rounded, realistic character, rather than a flat, unrealistic Slothrop who
bounces from terror to sex to terror to sex, God bless her. I love me some
realistic Great Tradition with Forster on top, truly I do -- but Tom, oh
you kid!

[addendum]

One more note, something so basic and obvious that we rarely think about it
(not that there isn't a bookcase of epistemological/ontological criticism
about it).

I have never (and going out on a limb, YOU have never) "listened" directly
to another human being's thoughts, felt their emotions and physical
sensations. But I have spent many, many thousands of hours reading words
that purport to give me just such access -- sometimes to "real" people
(autobiography, biography, some history, etc), much more often to fictional
characters who "exist" ONLY in those words and what I make of them. Mostly
I accept -- seek out -- an immersive experience in which there's no
subtitle or crawl saying "this is fiction, there is no Nick Carraway, there
are only marks on paper." I know that, but I'm really good at ignoring it.

IOW, the largest part of "what I know about people," after my own
experience (somewhat dubiously generalized), has been built out of reading.
The latter is certainly wider in range than the aggregate of all the most
intimate, revelatory talks I've had with other people (who might be
unreliable narrators, after all.) All this can readily be extended to
movies, television, and gossip for those less bookish than me and thee.

So is the Robertson-Bloom-Van Den Berg line of argument -- that human
nature is shaped by literature as well as shaping it -- really at all hard
to swallow? Isn't it just a sensible, parsimonious hypothesis that our
"theory of other minds" is based not just on ourselves plus others'
testimony and inference from their behavior, but  on all those non-people
we've spent all those hours "inhabiting" via a learned, conventional,
stylized form of telepathy/empathy that has no actual counterpart on land
or sea?

And if that's the case, isn't *any* discussion of fiction that strongly
valorizes "realistic characters"... how shall I say it?...  based on a
number of assumptions, many of which could not widely be regarded as sane?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150116/e776f390/attachment.html>