NP - Walter Ong on plot, detective genre and "round Characters" (& TP)

[matthew cissell]

Howdy folks,

When I was in the US this summer I picked up some used books as I
generally try to do when there. One of my finds was Walter Ong's *Orality
and Literacy - The Technologizing of the Word* (1982). At $4 it was well
worth it.

The aim and arc of his book is erudite and sound but what caught my eye was
what he writes later in the book.  He points out that "lengthy climatic
plot comes into being only with writing", which checks out once you
consider the very diverse epic poems from *The Epic of Gilgamesh* to* The
Odyssey *or later Icelandic Sagas. He goes on to argue that "the climactic
linear plot reaches a plenary form in the detective story".
   A few pages later he states that "In our typographic and electronic
culture, we find ourselves today delighted by exact correspondence between
the linear order of elements in discourse and the referential order, the
chronological order in the world to which the discourse refers. [...] When
today narrative abandons or distorts this parallelism, as in
Robbe-Grillet's *Marienbad* or Julio Cortázar's *Rayuela*, the effect is
clearly self-conscious." (I am tempted here to marry his view/ argument
with Bourdieu's work on art and taste.) From this view Ong states that
"Avant garde literature is now obliged to deplot its narratives or to
obscure their plots. But deplotted stories of the electronic age are not
episodic narratives. They are impressionistic and imagistic variations on
the plotted stories that preceded them."

However, along with more developed plotting or even later deplotted
narratives, Ong informs us that the "modern reader has typically understood
effective 'characterization' in narrative or drama as the production of the
'round character", (Ong cites Forester on the term). If this is the
literary virtue of the age, its opposite is that vice of 'flat'
characterization. He writes, "Complexity of motivation and internal
psychological growth with the passage of time makes the round character
like a 'real person'." Ong compares Homer's characters to those of
Sophocles, and then goes on to claim that there is "something distinctively
Calvanistic in the way Defoe's introspective characters relate to the
secular world." So he's writing with Ian Watt's study partly in mind.

According to Ong, "Late high-technology, electronic cultures still produce
type characters in regressive genres such as Westerns or in contexts of
self-conscious humor." He continues:
       "Just as the deplotted story of the late-print or electronic ahe
builds on classical plot and achieves its effect because of a sense that
the plot is masked or missing, so in the same age the bizarrely hollowed
characters that represent extreme states of consciousness, as in Kafka,
Samuel Beckett or Thomas Pynchon, achieve their effects because of the
contrast felt with their antecedents, the 'round' characters of the
classical novel. Such electronic-age characters would be inconceivable had
narrative not gone through a 'round' characters stage."

(Critics like James Wood are incapable of studying their own practice and
tastes and seeing that their own disposition (Wood loves Sebald - so
serious and sour - but despises Pynchon et al for their 'hollow characters'
and lack of gravitas) is a product of their habitus. Still, I find it odd
(or maybe it's confusing because he seems confused) that Wood will name
drop Barthes so that he has some "Theory" cred and talk the lingo and yet
trash writing that came from the same milieu.)

Characters in "extreme states of consciousness" sounds like Oedipa or Lew
Basnight even. These "hollowed characters" makes me think that Ong was
channeling Eliot to some degree. I mean Pirandello's "6 Characters" or most
of Beckett's characters has me listening for those "dried voices, when/ We
whisper together/ Are quiet and meaningless". This view of the
development of characterization in late print culture helps respond to the
charge of 'flat' characterization in Pynchon's work. On this view,
Pynchon's latest work is right in line with a rejection of type characters
and a use of irony that has marked his work (and that of many  others)
throughout his career.

Ok, sorry for the lengthy post. I just thought some might find Ong's
argument worth looking at; it might even support Mr. Bailey's ongoing
exploration of the idea of ST as being a pre-Code movie script of sorts. (A
tempting mise-en-abyme of the novel as a script to be turned into a script
returned to the world as a movie and then copied as cheap PI fiction.)

Peace and Solidarity
mc otis