Fwd: M & D Group Read (cont.)

[Mark Kohut]

"closer to the human experience of its characters"

Unlike his earlier works, many 'old-fashioned' [nineteenth century
ideal, say] book reviewers--and some not so old-fashioned kept finding
this 'fault' with P's work: no rounded characters, really, all flat,
all a flat board for satiric swatting.

Then with M & D the vote was virtually unanimous: M & D are 'real'
 rounded and fully human.

Do we think TRP just finally got it together as an artist to now make
this happen?

Or do we think he consciously had reasons all along for any
characterization differences?

Or do we think the first paragraph summary is wrong?


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2018 00:51:13 -0600
Subject: Re: M & D Group Read (cont.)
To: bulb at vheissu.net
Cc: Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>, Mark Kohut
<mark.kohut at gmail.com>, "\"“pynchon-l at waste.org“\""
<pynchon-l at waste.org>, owner-pynchon-l at waste.org

Would take some effort to prove (or even articulate, I say now as I
read this over again) this but my sense of the two novels is that M&D
is...closer to the human experience of its characters—perhaps because
it goes deeply into fewer of them—and this correlates with a kind
darker sense of the human tragedy that’s happening on the page in a
way that also correlates with a...more slippery/smoky/ironic/winking
with its prose and its linguistic fidelity to the moment. Time is
weirder in M&D, and even the deviations from/steps outside it seem
more nebulous in their logic, perhaps because that’s truer to the way
the world felt to many at that moment in history (the Age of Reason
being younger). Different projects, slightly different voices—both
denser/more apparent contemporary prose mimicry and more overt
anachronism in M&D

> On Jan 23, 2018, at 1:48 AM, bulb at vheissu.net wrote:
>
> "Chinaman" in Against the Day; 3 occurences, all in an opium context:
>
> - AD One 8.1: 82 (no - and his opium)
> - AD Two 16.1: 191 (Smoking opium with the -)
> - AD Three 36.7: 496 (opium products [...] -)
>
> Michel.
>
>
>
>
>
>> On 2018-01-22 22:44, Jochen Stremmel wrote:
>> And as a bit of evidence that the resourceful wikipedians don't know
>> everything:
>> "In its original sense, Chinaman is almost entirely absent from
>> British English, and has been since before 1965."
>> The original sense obviously being: "a dealer of china". A British
>> English speaker in London in the 2nd half of the 18th century could
>> only mean that. (A new twist to the joak.)
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l