Pynchon and babies

[hankhank at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu]

On Fri, 25 Oct 1996 matthew.percy at utoronto.ca wrote:
> In reading this passage, I felt acutely aware of why so many of my female 
> friends dislike Pynchon.  Granted, Pynchon seems to  expect the reader to 
> sympathize with  Esther in this argument (and with the women in the 
> novel, rather than the men - see Rachel's relationship with Profane) but 
> it still seems like a coldly male proposition here...  Given that _V._ 
> attempts to deal with (amongst other things) the subjugation 
> of/objectification of women (and others) by  a totalizing male European 
> gaze/ideological state apparatus/technology/phallogocentric 
> dominant historiography/substitute your fave theory, I find this section 
> extremely problematic, as it seems to reinscribe the maleness it wants to 
> attack.  How?  Well, Pynchon's (re: Esther's) slightly pro-life position 
> aside seems kinda misogynist to me.  (I'm sure you can argue historical 
> context here, or that Pynchon 
> wasn't attempting to attack a male-dominated society, but such an 
> argument necessarily reifies a misogynist perspective- we're reading the 
> novel here, in this moment, not in 1960; and if Pynchon isn't attacking 
> maleness of society, he's definitely participating in it.)   I think it's 
> fairly obvious to say that Pynchon's representations of women are 
> somewhat flawed (despite the intentions of his text); oftentimes, he 
> seems to reinforce what he satirizes (the treatmnent of women by the 
> whole sick Crew, for example).  

No flames, but I'd like to ask: is it so that Pynchon's representations of
women in _V._ are "flawed" in a way that representations of men are not? 
Is it "natural" for male characters to be "cold", but not for female
characters?
Do you want to maintain this division between manly coldness and womanly
warmness? (This is of course a hot question in feminist debates in general.) 
Might it be so that the Pynchon of _V._ would not like to maintain it, and
maybe for good reason? 
Or is it the contrary: _V._ being problematic because it finally favors
"atavistic", fertile womanhood, attacking this century's "unwomanly" violent 
femmes satirically? this is what Catharine Stimpson argued in the 70s.

But the novel is "problematic", indeed. E.g. Gilbert and Gubar connected
_V._ to the tradition of misogynist satires in the first part of their
magnum opus _No Man's Land_; in the third part they refer to the novel
much more favorably, as I recall.

Of course, it is _Lot 49_ and _Vineland_ that have been most often studied
in a feminist fashion. There's a whole book on _Lot 49_ from a Cixousian
angle: _Beyond and Beneath the Mantle_, by Georgiana Colvile. My friend,
the list member Terry Caesar has written on _Vineland_ and Pynchon's oeuvre 
as a whole as a "maternal construct", and there are also some feminist essays
in _Vineland Papers_. Takes on race issues are much fewer; there's this _P
Notes_ essay on _GR_ and the situation of blacks in the American sixties,
"Anachronism Intented", by Frederick Ashe. And the German book on Pynchon
and Hereros.

But back to _V._. Alice Jardine deals with the novel in _Gynesis_. She
reads it via feminism and Deleuze & Guattari, but sees (typically
Americanly) that Pynchon and American literature  pale in comparison 
with French literature, e.g. Sollers, whose _Femmes_ is really something
because it destroys the conventions of representation thoroughly.

But this avant-gardistic writerliness is for Linda Hutcheon, another
Torontoan, a form of ultra-modernism. Whereas postmodernist
"historiographic metafictions" seem to acknowledge that you just can't
totally flee conventions, but remain partially complicit with them. But
it is only through an inscription into conventions that any kind of
critique is possible, says LH. There are no outside positions, which 
makes writing traditional satires impossible. So, I would not say that
_V._ "reinforces what it satirizes". It is not any either-or question
like "attack OR participate" to me, but something more complex and
problematic.

I partly wrote this because I know many women who have read _V._ and 
loved it, but do not seem to go for _GR_ that much.

Heikki