Whose bodices are getting ripped?

[Vaska]

[big snip]
>So even if Pynchon wants to create a woman character completely divorced
>from any sexist aspect whatsoever, our fundamental (Western) construction
>of what "woman" signifies makes this an impossibility. Thanks to those of
>you who asked.  And ok ok I'll rent Fargo!
>Diana

Oh, come off it, Diana!  None of our fundamental (only Western?) conceptions
of "woman" prevent us from responding sans sexism to Leni Pokler; i.e. to
Leni as a human being, who also happens to be a wife and a mother, as well
as a political activist.  As I pointed out some weeks ago, it's Pynchon's
authorial decision to shove her into a brothel (his editor must have been
totally spineless to let that go by) that not only departs from the fairly
realistic Leni Pokler he had taken the trouble to write but actually reveals
the residual malice at the heart of one of Pynchon's own fairly conscious
and deliberate sexist "moments."  Neither language -- and no self-respecting
psycholinguist today would stake a bean on that long past exploded Wharfian
hypothesis, but then few literary theorists read or study linguistics -- nor
the historically entrenched culture of male narcissism can sweeten away such
authorial moves.  Not when they are made today and not when they were made
even twenty years ago.  

Why is it so hard -- and this is not directed specifically at Diana -- to
come to terms with these things?  Of course Pynchon's work *is* diminished
by the adventitous malice that enters his novels from time to time.  I'm
entirely at one with Wayne C. Booth on what he calls "the ethics of
fiction."  If art -- high or low or anywhere in between -- did not have its
ethical dimension, we wouldn't be spending so much time on some of these
questions; and, similarly, it would make no sense to speak of a writer's
generosity, compassion, and the like.  Pace so much 20th-cent. philosophy of
language, language is neither necessarily nor primarily a conceptual
prison-house.  We do have a 2000+ year old text such as Nicomachean Ethics,
for example, for evidence that it's possible to form concepts for realities
one cannot name in a particular language because the culture as a whole has
not (yet) internalized them but that one can nevertheless describe them --
Aristotle in fact talks about some virtues that Greek had no terms for and
found hard to recognize.  Aristotle was perfectly aware that he had no words
for certain things -- but it didn't stop him from conceptualizing them. 

And since I'm on this classical roll, whenever people start getting carried
away with that comforting wishy-washy (pseudo?)liberal notion that ascribes
some inexorable powers to the dynamics of cultural determination, I think of
Musonius Rufus: a little-known Stoic whose only extant work (the whole text,
I mean), is "Should Women Do Philosophy?"  Dear old Musonius tells his Stoic
brethren that, why, of course: a woman is a human being with powers of
reason and reflection equal to that of any man.  And then goes on to add: if
the problem is that should women start "doing philosophy" no housework would
get done, it's the male philosopher who really ought to have enough sense to
sweep that floor and do those dishes rather than expect to be served.
Musonius was not a genius -- just a decent guy -- and certainly remarkable
for his outspoken feminism, anti-slavery speeches and activist pacifism in a
culture that seemed entirely incapable of producing such "subject positions"
among men of his class and education.

Vaska