Francis Ponge is a French poet who among many other things wrote a book I read twenty years ago: Le Parti pris des choses (translated into English as Partisan of Things). His procedure is simple: Ponge looks for the extraordinary in the ordinary. He's not interested in exhausting the object in language, he doesn't seek definition by extension. For Ponge the "cigarette" is not a cylindrical roll of paper filled with shredded tobacco, designed to be lit at one end for smoking, but "a small torch much less luminous than aromatic". Ponge does not define an object, he seems to search for something more like an incantation!
While developing Bahnsen Knights, Francis Ponge never crossed my mind. However, upon reviewing my notes, his writing procedure came to mind. Something about pulp fiction has always intrigued me. In this narrative style, character building rarely involves a comprehensive study of a particular personality. There isn't sufficient time for in-depth exploration, and character development is likely to be 'flat'.
Many criticize this in pulp fiction. But this flatness tends to be boring if the definition of a character is based merely on clichés. If it is based on the uncommon, the result can be quite different. All our characters are flat, but of a singular flatness!
Take Kevin, for example, the owner of Danny's Bar in Bahnsen Knights. Kevin inherited the bar, and if he works there it's because he feels he owes it to his father—Danny, after whom the bar is named. Kevin, when he was a young boy waiting tables, met a customer who gave him a copy of Scientific American where he could read a column by Martin Gardner. He became obsessed with that column and his father paid for a subscription. After that subscription, others would follow—most notably, one for a writing workshop.
Who is Kevin then? He isn't just the big guy bartender who gets into an occasional fight with the more violent patrons at a dive bar, Kevin is passionate about math and writing thanks to the mail subscription services of certain publications.
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When someone criticizes any narrative work by arguing that a character's development lacks depth, I smile. Rather than depth, rather than exhaustion, I prefer this flatness, the definition on a plane of the uncommon: two singular points can define a unique straight line.