Pynchon and women

[Murthy Yenamandra]

Vaska Andjelkovic writes:
> I'm not sure that being seduced -- and I agree with your passive
> construction -- confirs on Frenesi much in the way of agency (unless you
> want to give it a heavily Sartrean twist, of course).

I think that the seduction, at least as depicted in Vineland, does
involve some agency on Frenesi's part. It is pointed out in quite a few
places that she had different choices and was aware that she had them
(however limiting those choices may have been).  To a large extent, she
actively participates in the seduction, although as if in a trance (she
seems to feel as if she's going along with the flow of the Situation and
it's always Too Late). Notice that Sasha's realization of her uniform
fetish doesn't translate into cooperation (in fact puts her on guard),
whereas Frenesi's does.

> Also, it is
> precisely that exercise of self-will or agency that Pynchon has DL regard
> with a sense of shame, failure, remorse: I'm thinking of the passage on pp.
> 252-3 beginning with "Later, of course [. . .] she could appreciate how
> broadly she'd violated the teachings of her sensei."

Let me quote part of this (pp 252-3, DL looking back):

    "She had not become the egoless agent of somebody else's will, but
    was acting instead out of her own selfish passions. If the motive
    itself was tainted, then the acts, no matter how successful or
    beautifully executed, were false, untrue to her calling, to herself,
    and someday there would be a payback, long before which she would
    understand that by far the better course would have been to leave
    Frenesi where she was."

I think what DL is wishing she hadn't done is not letting Frenesi follow
the path she has chosen by kidnapping her out of the camp. Had she left
Frenesi where she was, Frenesi would've been forced to face up to Brock
and the fact of her cooperation and followed the chain(s) of her own
actions. DL is realizing that out of her passion to "rescue" Frenesi from
herself, she has committed an action untrue to her calling.  This only
reinforces the point of Frenesi's agency and DL's sense of shame comes
from interfering with it. That's how I read it.

> But what I had in mind when I wrote the message you quote is the long
> passage of musings on p. 83.   Is it too much to ask what on earth Pynchon
> is doing dragging out and refurbishing, in historically inflected late-20th
> century terms,  the misogyny of the Judeo-Christian myth of the Fall?
> [...] it tends to give credence to the idea
> of an inherited and heritable spiritual flaw that Sasha (not a little
> incongruously to my mind) fears in herself *as a woman*.

I also had this same passage in mind - one of the troubling ones for me
too when I was reading the novel. I agree with you that Pynchon is
recreating the Fall, but I'm not so sure of the misogyny. My growing
conviction has been that Frenesi is standing in, not for Woman, but for
Us - so I think what he's trying to get at is not so much the inherent
flaw in Women, but in all of us. Here is part of it from page 83:

    "Sasha believed her daughter had "gotten" this uniform fetish from
    her. It was a strange idea even coming from Sasha, but since her
    very first Rose Parade up till the present she'd felt in herself a
    fatality, a helpless turn toward images of authority, especially
    uniformed men, whether they were athletes live or on the Tube,
    actors in movies of war through the ages, or maitre d's in
    restaurants, not to mention waiters and busboys, and she further
    believed that it could be passed on, as if some Cosmic Fascist had
    spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and
    initiation into the dark joys of social control. [...] Sasha on her
    own had arrived at, and been obliged to face, the dismal possibility
    that all her oppositions, however just and good, to forms of power
    were really acts of denying that dangerous swoon that came creeping
    at the edges of her optic lobes every time the troops came
    marching by, that wetness of attention and perhaps ancestral curse."

That "helpless turn toward authority, especially uniformed men" applies
to everyone. Don't all those images tallied up by Pynchon appeal equally
(perhaps even primarily) to men? I think he is letting us see through
the eyes of Sasha and Frenesi and discover ourselves. Even though most
of the traditional interpretations of the Fall are misogynistic (yet
another one of those convenient fictions), the actual Fall itself is not
- both Man and Woman chose knowledge (and power) over life and this has
been handed down the generations. While Sasha realizes this potential
for going over to the other side and it makes her even more watchful as
a result (her oppositions may be acts of denying that swoon, but deny
she does), each generation has to make its own choices.

> Finally, am I way off-center in suggesting that Prairie's flirtation with
> Brock Vond is but another reworking of the old rape-fantasy scenario?

Yeah, I don't quite know what to make of that, either. 

> The sympathy Pynchon extends to Frenesi, Sasha, DL, and Prairie is palpable
> -- but I also feel that it verges on being patronizing.

It's here that we really disagree - I think the sympathy Pynchon extends
to frenesi is sparked by our identification with her seduction. This is
far from patronizing.

Murthy

-- 
Murthy Yenamandra, Dept of CompSci, U of Minnesota. mailto:yenamand at cs.umn.edu
"Always there's that space between what you feel and what you do, and in
that gap all human sadness lies." - _Blue Dog_