M & D Deep Duck continues.

Fri Jan 16 17:44:42 CST 2015

(sent this only to monte earlier by mistake)

re: Pynchon's character's "flatness", I read the introduction to Slow
Learner recently and was intrigued by this passage:

"Disagreeable as I find 'Low-lands' now, it's nothing compared to my
bleakness of heart when I have to look at 'Entropy'. The story is a fine
example of a procedural error beginning writers are always being cautioned
against. *It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other
abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to
conform to it.* By contrast, the characters in 'Low-lands', though
problematic in other ways, were at least where I began from, bringing the
theoretical stuff in later, just to give the project a look of educated
class. Otherwise it would only have been about a number of unpleasant
people failing to resolve difficulties in their lives, and who needs that?
Hence, adventitious lectures about tale-telling and geometry."

So Pynchon starts his stories from characters first? This honestly
surprised me when I read it. To me his characters are flat (mostly) but his
books are so full of humanity in other ways it doesn't matter.

On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 10:26 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> [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?
>
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