anudder question

[Christopher James Tassava]

I'm sorry if some readers of my last post though I was insinuating that 
"Pynchon" does not exist.  Obviously, he does.  What fascinates me about 
the relatively outlandish propositions of identity (Pynchon is really 
Salinger/Delillo/Gaddis/etc) is that people can overlook some fairly 
large differences between those writers (not just style or topic, either, 
but such trivia as year of birth, say, or verifiable data of personal 
history) to try and force some relationship into existence.  Part of me 
wonders, "Geez: can't they just accept that he's not going to pump out a 
book a year for two decades?"  Another part of me wishes that TRP _would_ 
write a book of year.  Certain parts of my brain want a new book 
already.  (Those parts of my brain share a whole mess of synapses with 
the other parts of my brain which wonder if perhaps "Don Delillo" isn't 
just a well-trained actor, standing in as "the author of _Mao II_" while 
the "real author" [our man Pynchon, of course] lolls anonymously around 
Orange County/Manhattan/et al.)

In reading and rereading Pynchon's oeuvre, his female characters, by and 
large, have become much more vivid to me than his male characters.  In 
the previously alluded-to seminar at the Newberry Library, we talked at 
some length about whether Pynchon can be construed as a feminist in any 
way.  That may have been a vocabularic reach, "feminist," but Pynchon 
seems to invest a great deal of time and energy into his female 
characters (Oedipa, most notably, but _V._, _GR_ and _Vl_ all have 
interesting, central characters, too) nonetheless.  Is this question a 
non-issue for other readers?  If so, why, and if not, why is it interesting?

Christopher Tassava