gender and VINELAND

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

Vaska firmly distances from my attempt at concurrence.  I love it when you think you're 
agreeing w/ somebody and they come back and say, you know, *that is not it at all/that is 
not what I meant at all* or something.  I was pretty fuzzy in my comment, granted, but 
please, no lectures about incubating daddy frogs or smart eggs that do the choosing.  I 
wasn't talking at all about biology.  I was talking about difference .  I should have used yin 
and yang or some other duality. And don't imagine for an instant you have escaped your 
own dualistic blinders in your conceiving of the problem.  What I also realize is that I 
misread your VINELAND remark--you were talking about content and I was talking 
about style (another double-bind!); you were talking about specific statements, dicta, 
theories presented by the text and I was talking about the flavor, the motion the surface 
feel of the text.  I can see how this misalignment could put all further talk between us at 
cross purposes.  Anyway, chide on, as long as you continue to be *snide but not in a 
seriously unfriendly way*; but please warn me if you decide to become seriously 
unfirendly.  Happy Thanksgiving; enjoy pulling that poor old Tom Turkey leg.

john m



>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
>
>