M & D Deep Duck continues.

[David Morris]

I think he is acknowledging his weaknesses, yet embracing them.

On Friday, January 16, 2015, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> (3) Tongue in cheek, and head in paper bag.
>
> On Friday, January 16, 2015, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','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> 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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