M&D is Pynchon Heavy (fat and unbound characters)

[alice malice]

 M&D is taught in difficult classes to bewildered undergraduates and
to pretentious graduate students and by professional readers of
literature who have, so they suppose, a frame of reference, a level of
understanding and sophistication far greater than that of Pynchon's
audience or any of Pynchon's professional detractors (Wood, Kakutani,
...).

So, he writes, as Milton did, for the Elect? For a few heaven bound
almost-angels who dance on the head of Pyn? That seems a contradiction
given his leveling of high and low culture, his obvious sympathies for
the non-elect, the preterit.

Why should Pynchon give up complexity, his trade, his craft, his
innovations and experimentations, his genius...and so on, to satisfy
Wood, Kakutani and their ilk?

Why makes things easy, convenient, or satisfy the reader's demands or
expectations?

Who died and made the reader king?

The author died.  So says Barthes and it's a useful idea so we will
make use of it and divide the author from the work. But the death of
the author is not the death of the text.

Now the reader and the text are still alive. They give life to each other.

If the reader is dependent on the text and the text the reader, the
author, though dead, haunts the reading yet, and challenges reader
tyranny?

Connect the poetic objects (Aristotle's poetic silence to Eliot's
objective correlative).

Some, McHale and others, call P's fiction postmodern and attribute his
"fucking with the reader" as the next and obvious move after the
Moderns made it super difficult, so Postmodern is a philosophical and
physical paradigm shift. Sure.

But something else is going on here in M&D and we're on to it at the
character level. The author, though dead, haunts these characters, not
merely with the erasure of adjectives and adverbs (Joyce from Hero to
Portrait); or the use of the objects and contexts and actions,  so
passions and thoughts are not spelled out (narrators don't say, he was
a dark and stormy cleric), and not with the fragments shored against
ruins (though this is used to great effect in GR), but with
anti-reason and anti-matter.

Connect wha?

So characters are fat not flat. They are stuffed pigs and they fly on
the wings of a free and dead author, unbound from the reader's
tyranny.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l