M & D Deep Duck continues.

[Mark Kohut]

I have long entertained a similar notion although, to me, it is a
broader modernity that leads to loss of the 18th-19th Bourgeois self.
Book: LOSS OF THE SELF IN LITERATURE AND ART....Wylie Sypher I draw
from.

I also want to add a postscript to the deep analyses and long-thought
opinions re Pynchon and character as expressed in SLOW LEARNER.

Trying out impure logic: first, he is talking about his short stories
ONLY there.(Remember that he calls Lot49, an evident failure in his
mind, a short story marketed as a novel.)  He does express, I take it
as an earnest, not leg-pulling statement of his aesthetic of writing
the story, that they should start with character not idea. Basic
writing belief re the 'life' that fiction "should' contain, to
distinguish it from a form of the essay,  but the concept of Round
characters is seldom applied to short stories. Not enough room to
round 'em.

If Christopher Perec's terrif argument re how character(s) are
consistent with theme(s) is true of GR---and I would agree---we can
still ask whether he "started with character; or at least made
character equal to the overarching notions; expressed themes
through them most--all--of the book. From Pirate thru about everyone,
Roger and Jessica,to a Slothrop so purposely Unround as to disappear,
I would think he believed he 'started with', 'worked thru' character
that whole masterpiece long. Yet some dissers of the book---Susan
Sontag, for example, who maintained it was just SF and shared that
genre's general lack of characters.

Even James Wood, finding new Pynchon faults with Against the Day said
there was no one, nothing as characterologically memorable as Ahab nor
Blicero in it!

2nd bit of attempted "logic": from the SLOW LEARNER intro we do not
really know what he thought of Roundedness of character in novels,
20th-21st century novels per Kai. Later novels show he did, it seems;
the novels still show that is not his major strength but he might
think he did it his best in V. and Vineland and was stretching out
even more as he wrote the later two BIG ones. But surely in BLEEDING
EDGE at least he shows his vision of diminished selves, Maxine's, her
parents, etc.



On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 5:37 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> Could it be that the 'round character' as such,  existing in the Bourgeois
> world during the 18th and the 19th century, died on the battle fields of
> World War I?
>
> "The remainder of the message," Weissmann continued, now reads:
> DIEWELTISTALLESWASDERFALLIST."
> "The world is all that the case is," Mondaugen said. "I've heard that
> somewhere before." A smile began to spread.  (V, p. 278)
>
> In a world which is everything that is the case, roundness of character is
> something human being cannot afford any longer. Pynchon doesn't quote
> Wittgenstein to make a philosophical statement, he quotes the famous opener
> from the Tractatus, originally scribbled down by Ludwig in the trench, as a
> symptom of historical decline. The decline of roundness, so to speak.
>
> If the watershed of WW I is crucial here, it shouldn't take wonder that the
> characters from M & D are 'rounder' than those from GR,  CoL 49, or Bleeding
> Edge.
>
>
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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