M & D Deep Duck continues.

[David Morris]

(3) Tongue in cheek, and head in paper bag.

On Friday, January 16, 2015, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','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
>> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','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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