M & D Deep Duck continues.

Fri Jan 16 19:41:20 CST 2015

He does say that, and he's in no way defending "Low-lands" (or any of the
stories in the collection except for "The Secret Integration" a little
bit). He's just using "Entropy" as an example of a failure. He calls it
"too conceptual":

"Given my undergraduate mood, [Henry] Adams's sense of power out of
control, coupled with [Norbert] Wiener's spectacle of universal heat-death
and mathematical stillness, seemed just the ticket. But the distance and
grandiosity of this led me to short-change the humans in the story. I think
they come off as synthetic, insufficiently alive. The marital crisis
described is once again, like the Flanges', unconvincingly simplified. *The
lesson is sad, as Dion always sez, but true: get too conceptual, too cute
and remote, and your characters die on the page*."

All of his problems with "Entropy" sound like a lot of critics' problem
with Pynchon's work in general.

 I guess it's important to note that this introduction was written in 1984,
which means only V, CoL49 and GR had been published. Pynchon was possibly
writing Vineland or M&D, the two novels that are considered fullest in
terms of characters (I think), at the time too. It really makes me wonder
what Pynchon thinks of those first 3 novels. CoL49 we all know he has utter
disdain for, and he insinuates that he sees V only as an apprentice effort
(from SL: "Apprentices in all fields and times are restless to be
journeymen...By the time I wrote 'The Secret Integration' I was embarked on
this phase of the business. I had published a novel and thought I knew a
thing or two...").
GR of course is the exception. The masterpiece. And it's also maybe the
only time that he saw it acceptable to break his rule of starting from
character. When your themes are paranoia, conspiracy, free will, corruption
etc then why not have your characters and events conform to them?

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 12:50 AM, Laura <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> I don't have the Slow Learner intro handy, but doesn't he say that
> Lowlands is based on a story a Navy friend told him about his own
> honeymoon, and its disruption by the real-life prototype of Pig Bodine,
> whom Pynchon eventually met? He started with these characters, though he
> didn't do a great job of fleshing them out.
>
> Laura
>
>
> John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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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