gender and VINELAND

[Vaska]

At 05:29 PM 11/26/96 PST, Mascaro wrote:

"I have long felt that VINELAND is clearly and queerly paying a kind of
homage to *feminized* writing in the deep sense used by the critics DYB and
y'all quote a lot--Kristeva, Irigiray etc--IMHO he heard the emerging
feminist critique of his phallocentrism as it resides in the first three
novels, and responded."

I didn't really have anything like "feminine" or "feminized" writing in
mind.  I'd hardly do so since I don't think there any such thing.  What I
was referring to were bits and pieces of the text that could have come
straight out of a Sedgwick article, for example.  Also, you need to remember
that Pynchon knew a fair amount about feminism at the time he was working on
_GR_: the only *contemporary* writer he mentions by name in _GR_ is M.F.
Beale, who is rumored to have been a close friend of his.  Don't want to
take up too much space here, but there's that PomoC article by Wes Chapman
that goes into this at some length.  The odd thing about _Vineland_ is that
the left hand either doesn't know or can't give a damn about what the right
hand is doing, which isn't much of a good thing in my book: the
contradictions remain.  


"There seems to me no way out of the conundrum that if you say in VINELAND
his writing is feminized and someone says what does that mean you have to
rely on accepted characteristics of feminine to explain, and then it sounds
like you're promoting or accepting those characteristics as inherently
applying to women and not to men.  But masculine and feminie are just ways
to name difference.  It's all about difference."

Hmmm, you could've fooled me.  Seriously, though: there's never been a
moment in our cultural history (the last 3,000 odd years, say) when these
two terms have functioned simply as markers of difference.  Not one.

"We say male things project and female things accept; male pushes against
and intrudes, female covers and protects; male is linear, female recursive
and on and on."

Do "we"?  I certainly don't -- count me out, John.  What I know of human
reproduction and the biophysiological aspects of sexual bimorphism in our
species tells me that even the ovum does nothing like "accept" or "receive":
anyone out there with first-hand lab work and appropriately impressive
credentials to explain the actual processes involved, or shall I start
digging for the reference?

"There are these two distinctly different universal forces; our names for
them reflect only the narrowness of our conceptual fields--not that this is
a criticsm of human beings, just a design feature."

Are there, indeed?  Back to those two, ah?  I do mean to sound snide but not
in a seriously unfriendly way.  What intrigues me is that the characterstics
usually ascribed to these allegdedly universal forces tend to be remarkably
unstable.  Not to mention anything but universal, even on the purely
biological level: there is a frog-species, for instance, in which the papa
frog spends something like three weeks going without any food whatsoever
because the baby tadpoles gestate inside his mouth.  These papa frogs are
known to actually risk total starvation and death in protecting their
progeny.  Talk about protecting and enveloping.  A universally feminine
characterstic?  Quit pulling my leg.

Vaska