Pynchon and women

[Vaska Andjelkovic]

Murthy and I have been having quite a conversation here, and with everyone
else's silence on the topic, I'm beginning to wonder if we might be getting
on other people's nerves.  So if you don't want to read this, please go
ahead and delete the e-mail.  On the other hand . . . .

I'll try to respond point by point, leaving the quotations where they seem
to me to be necessary.

>> 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.

Yes: DL's regret is fully anchored, warranted by the events.  Notice,
however, that the whole notion of agency becomes so fuzzy and flexible as to
encompass anything and everything a character may do (in a trance-like
state, cold sober, etc.).  Applied to  _Vineland_ as a means of smoothing
out some of the things we both seem to find disturbing, though to a
different degree, to be sure, it becomes one of those double-bind concepts
one can use any which way one finds convenient: a concept that serves a
rhetorical (but not an explanatory) function.  Besides which, I found it
strange that a writer for whom questions of control -- and the need to
liberate oneself from heteronomy -- are so central would, and in relation to
a woman character, suddenly resurrect (approvingly) the ideal of
self-surrender.  The wording, I think, is important.  And in this particular
context, it looks very much like the traditional religious ideal of the good
woman as a vessel of God: i.e. not a free agent in any sense of the word.

It also strikes me that, especially in _Vineland_, a novel so much about
"mediated lives" and the political uses of representation, "the war of
images," the logical-writerly thing would be to attribute a sexual fetish
to a historically long and every now and agin re-inforced cultural
conditioning: which is indeed what Pynchon does in _GR_, but with a
reference to a male character.  A bit of interesting asymmetry.

>> 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.  [. . . ]
    "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.

Well, no.  Not in terms of what Pynchon (or "the text") is doing here.

>Don't all those images tallied up by Pynchon appeal equally
>(perhaps even primarily) to men?

I really don't know.  But if so, why ascribe the fascination to an almost
genetic female peculiarity?  And then, just for good measure, weigh it with
allusions to the notion of original sin and "ancestral curse"?  I think the
questions I raise are legitimate: we can take Frenesi as an Everyman figure
only if we ignore both this passage and that strange three-generation
pattern you've noticed in the novel.  Which asks for a lot of ignoring to do.

>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.

I think that 16+ centuries of sexually asymmetrical interpretations of that
story, interpretations that have been (in their several permutations)
culturally central, tend to prevail -- unless a writer bothers to distance
himself from them.  Not the case here.  Why?

>> 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.

I, too, cringe to admit that Pynchon -- arguably the most intelligent and
gifted of contemporary male writers we have -- could be doing exactly what
he seems to be doing.  At the risk of being judged sentimental: it saddens me.  

>> 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.

My level of discomfort in venturing to suggest it is obvious from the
"verges on".  But I'll agree to disagree on this: obviously, it makes sense
only if the questions I've raised here and in my previous postings have some
validity. Otherwise, of course, it sinks.

Vaska Andjelkovic
vaska at geocities.com