Pynchon - a product of his times redux

[David Casseres]

Jean sez

>     ...M*A*S*H could never be made today.  
>     Why?  Well, let's see, you've got WAY too much boozing, pot-smoking 
>     and unclean living, the nurses are only there to be chased around and 
>     otherwise harassed by the doctors, the only black character in the 
>     movie is nicknamed "Spearchucker" and goddamn if it doesn't commit the 
>     ultimate sin in the eyes of America, it actually corrupts the 
>     god-given game of football into a stoned, cheating travesty!!
>     
>     Most of which is meant ironically (the Spearchucker gag, and the 
>     absolute brilliance of using a football game to send up the war 
>     complex) but the sexism and the pat response to homosexuality (they 
>     have a nurse "do" the guy whose going to off himself because he's gay, 
>     and, hey, presto, he's cured!) are real, and are IMHO most definitely 
>     reflections of the prevailing attitude at the time, even among the 
>     couterculture.  I'm not sure that the 60's generation (help me out, ye 
>     p-listers of a certain age) would have really identified it AS sexism, 
>     since they were too busy freeing mankind THROUGH sex to question 
>     gender roles as such, except for those artsy-fartsies hanging out in 
>     Manhattan with Edie and Andy.  The 60's attitude seems to be a great 
>     grok on the fact that the women could actually now RESPOND to the 
>     men's leering overtures and slap and tickle fantasies with their own 
>     lusty libidos.  It wasn't until the 70's, with the rise of modern 
>     feminism, that that behavior was identified with oppressiveness viz a 
>     viz the objectification of women.

All quite true, and as a genyouwine '60's radical and hippie (yeah both) 
I can confirm that neither I nor anyone I knew would have remarked on 
what we would now find noticeably offensive in M.A.S.H.  Even those of 
us, and there were many, who DID understand that it is wrong to objectify 
women and that forced heterosexual experience is not what gays need or 
want -- we would have shrugged off the sexism and homophobia if we even 
noticed it.  Why?  Because in those respects the movie was no different 
from everything around it, and cleaner than a lot.  (And we were all 
kindly disposed toward it for its general disrespect for authority, its 
refusal to glamorize war in any way, etc.)

And number one, that general prevalence of sexism, racism, and homophobia 
should not be an excuse for any artist who actually espoused these 
things.  And number two, it certainly doesn't mean that anyone 
*inescapably* produced sexist or racist or homophobic art, even if we buy 
the idea that everyone inescapably embodies the cultural dirt that he 
grows up with.

And mainly, number three, getting back to whatsisname at last, Andrew is 
100% right in pointing out that there is absolutely nothing in Pynchon's 
actual text that can honestly be accused of racist, sexist, or homophobic 
intent, by commission or by omission.  The book is full of racists and 
sexists and homophobes because the world is too (now just as much as 
then), and Pynchon is obviously highly aware of this and much more 
concerned with it than Altman and his writers in M.A.S.H.  I don't think 
Altman was being particularly r. or s. or h. either, by the way, I think 
he just wasn't focusing on those things as problems.

Pynchon uses the bigotry, casual or intense, of his characters as one 
part of the general machinery of his novels.  Does he denounce bigotry?  
No, he's not in the denunciation business much.  I think he assumes we 
know bigotry when we see it, and he certainly doesn't make it look 
attractive.

And finally, does Pynchon write phallocentrically?  Sure he does.  It 
isn't an indictment, though, just a fact of life about almost all male 
authors.  It's worth mentioning and hardly worth denying, it seems to me. 
 In much the same way he writes as a white American, and I think no one 
could ever mistake his voice for that of a Japanese or an Indian.  The 
characters of Tchitcherine and Enzian are about as far as he can get from 
his own skin and culture, and Enzian is a weird, deracinated chimera born 
in Germany.  As for women, though, like any male author he can't avoid 
them and has to just try his best.  In the context of his generally 
cartoonlike characters, I think he does reasonably well with the female 
ones.

Cheers,
David