1 more on TP and sexism

[Adrian Kelly]

I was adding to the debate on TP and sexism the other day when, having
forgotten (natch) to turn off my call waiting function, a phone-call from
a student needing help on an essay (oh what gall) interrupted my long and
passionate post.  Fortunately for you, I will summarize in brief my thoughts.
To accuse Pynchon of sexism is, I think, not only narrow minded, to misread
his sexual/textual politics.  Disturbing scenes and characterizations
pervade his fiction, certainly, but to call pynchon sexist solely because of
this is symptomatic of the massive loss of a sense of irony that characterizes
the worst of the politically correct (oh I hate to use the term, but a bit more
on it in a second) cerebral guardians to the gates of anticeptic, sanctified
culture.  This lack of irony, of an ability to read beneath superficial content
is contagious;  if some of my undergrads see the word 'nigger' or 'bitch' in a
work, it is immediatately racist and/or sexist and they have done their good
critical deed for the day.  My simple point is that even if we can cast
aside spurious speculations and determine unequivocally a text's ideological
stance, even if a text is racist/sexist/classist/ etc. we should read it
anyway, not simply because 'oh, it's 'L'itratyure', but because of what it
can teach us about ideology and its manifestatiions or permutations in
narrative.  I would like to continue on this tirade-tangent, but I will
recommend a study like Jameson's Fables of Aggression (an investigation of the
once avowedly fascist, misogynistic Wyndham Lewis) as an eloquent defence of
the need to study morally questionable authors.
     This returns to me TP, and not because I think he is morally questionable,
but on the contrary because of the way in which he deconditions our reflexive
(ie discursively legislated and maintained) 'morality'.  Let's consider GR,
specifically the sado-masochisms of Blicero's menage a trois. Those sexual
perversities commonly or stereotypically associated with the perverse Nazi
male, or even with the psychopolitical dynamics of fascism, are really only
an overt manifestation of the same master-slave dynamics which pervade
other western (patriarchal) cultures, and which we clothe in sentiment.  I
think that Pynchon makes this plain.  The initial scenes involving Blicero,
Katje, and Gottfried, are strategically juxtaposed (sometiems back to back
I think) to our initial exposure to Roger and Jessica.  Initially, I think
R and J, hiding from the chaos of the war in thier makeshift domestic
domicile  ("They are in love.  Fuck the War".), playing silly love games,
exchanging witticisms, may elicit the readers' (un)conditioned sentiment and
support, contrasted perhaps to our (condtioned ) initial revulsion to Blicero.
Look very carefully, however, at the many rhetorical parallels between the
scenes involving the 'loving' couple and the 'perverse' trio.  Specifically,
compare Katje's diction to Jessica's.  Both are woman trapped in masculist
dyamics, the difference being the Katje simply knows it and plays along until
she can escape.  Jessica, on the other hand, unself-consciously subscribes to
B-movie romance cliche.  She fulfills a pre-scripted role.  Many of the scenes
between her and Rog (thier first encounter, their first kiss) are right out of
movie cliche.  Pynchon, I think, provides enough hints so that we can watch
ourselves watching Jessica.  Or perhaps on a second read we can see the way
in which we were suckered into our own conditioned affinity for the hyper-
real.  Regardless, it is interesting to note that the only 'normal' relation-
 ship in the novel, ie the only one that upholds a conventioanlized,
heterosexual dynamic, *is literally predicated on war*.  After the war
(which Jessica romanticizes) she knows that she must return to Beaver, who
to Roger emblematizes the "rationalized power-ritual that will be the coming
peace".  The same words, I think, are used by Kat to describe her s-m
games with Blicero, and by the extrapolation that the juxtaposition of her and
Jess invites, can be applied to Roger and Jessica's relationship too.
  Other such examples abound in the novel,
perhaps somebody could comment on the (in)famous Pudding scene.  I wanted to,
but I've gone on too long and in too pedantic a fashion.  I'd just like to
say that due attention has been paid to GR's reversal of von Clausewitz's
dictum.  In the wake of WW2, "peace is war pursued by other means."  I would
add that Pynchon, perhaps more than any other male author, expands the views
of Virginia Woolf in her passionate and prescient work _Three Guineas_ to
conclude that sexuality is war pursued by other means.