M & D Deep Duck continues.

[John Bailey]

That's always left me honestly confused as well.

I can sort of see Pynchon starting off with characters in Vineland,
Bleeding Edge, maybe V. Even M&D, though you can reduce Mason and
Dixon to cartoony binaries. But characters such as Doc Sportello and
Slothrop and a good swag of AtD foax are pleasant enigmas to me. I
have zero problem reading their somewhat hollow (as opposed to flat)
characterisations as a somewhat political manoeuvre, an alternative to
the ontological conservatism of the realist mode which reinforces the
discrete alienation of individuals with their insides and outsides and
the idea that the material world is what it is and can be captured
rather than created.

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 10:44 AM, Christoph Perec
<christophperec at gmail.com> wrote:
> (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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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l