M & D Deep Duck continues.

[Monte Davis]

I reacted the same way to that claim to have 'learned better' and 'put
characters first.'

I've wondered about that and other passages in the introduction -- unlikely
as either seems, could he be (1) saying what he thinks he ought to say? or
(2) a poor judge in some respects of his own strengths?

On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 6:44 PM, 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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