Pynchon's Coast: Inherent Vice and the Twilight of the Spatially Specific

[Mark Kohut]

Yes, I suggest that the Cyprian plot, for example what's his name with the broken leg, is moving. Yes also to Mason & Dixon's deaths. I think that there is real focus on "individual psychology"  in both of those books. But poignant deaths and other sufferings may not be the best way to judge roundedness. 

And I think there are aesthetic reasons out of P's vision besides that nice line about " too shopworn ..to treat unironically).

But, although William Logan is a fine reviewer ( and poet) in general, and although he is bringing up once again what many see as a touchstone example, I do not think it works very well to make the case for rounded characters in general, if that is the case being made. 
First: as touchstone that touchstone is Victorian sentimentality. ( if Little Nell is a rounded character, the criteria are other ones).
Second: millions have cried then and recently over deaths in bad--non--art. Love Story anyone
As rounded characterization? 
Third: Scenes such as Little Nell's death are a major reason Dickens took so long to be judged " great".
Fourth: is Gulliver well-rounded? Very Yes, I say but there is no pathos. The book, like most of Pynchon is satire, fiercely so ( as w much of Pynchon). Has anyone ever cried over a Nathaniel West character? Miss Lonelyhearts made me very sad but ???  Tristram Shandy? What does " rounded characterization mean in such fiction? 
Fifth: That ' social realism' in fiction has again and again been seen as " shopworn" by new artists who argue that it can't be art if it is just like the past is another " tradition" by now. 

PS I have just read Wood's full-of-praise review of Gilead. Quite an unironic novel that I am as stone-hearted over as Oscar Wilde was by the death of Little Nell. One of us is wrong. 






Sent from my iPad

> On Mar 7, 2015, at 10:25 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> More re Wood and "roundedness" from former P-lister Bill Millard:
> 
> "In certain critical quarters there has long been a characterization problem in Pynchon. One reasonable way to put it is William Logan's observation, apropos of various excesses in Against the Day, that "no one has ever wept over the death of a Pynchon character the way thousands wept over Little Nell." Defenders might counter either that his major characters rarely die in view of the reader, that Dickensian sentiment is too shopworn an effect to treat unironically, or that certain of Pynchon's deaths (without hesitation, I would nominate those of Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason) are in fact seriously moving. But the objection still stands. Those who seek psychological roundedness and credibility above all else in fiction do not customarily find it here, certainly not in overprivileged heavies like Fenway. Perhaps Pynchon's general refusal of interiority for many characters indicates not an inattention to individual psychology or, as James Wood would have it, an outright authorial incompetence at the task of constructing credible, nuanced, and realistic individual perspective (for Wood, arguably the central task of any serious novel). The steady attainment of greater self-awareness by Sportello, despite his intellectual and cultural limitations and his memory-beclouding inhalations, indicates that Pynchon is capable of considerable psychological nuance when he puts his mind to it. I would add that on the far larger canvas of Against the Day, the extended Cyprian Latewood plot (which arises in mid-novel, too far along for the more impatient reader or reviewer even to have noticed it) presents a decisive response to Wood's charges of chronic immaturity, superficiality, and overtheatricality. But an equally plausible alternative is that Pynchon habitually eschews a close focus on individual psychology because of a fully serious conviction that it is simply not as interesting as broader social systems, either as an intellectual problem or as an aesthetic object."
> 
>> On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 12:49 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
>> http://www.collegehillreview.com/004/0040501.html
>> 
>> Pynchon’s California
>> 
>> http://www.uiowapress.org/books/2014-fall/pynchon’s-california.htm
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150308/7b24283c/attachment.html>