response to Diana's re: author's bios, etc.

[Vaska Andjelkovic]

I haven't read _V_ in a long while now, but what you say strikes me as very
sensible.  One of the things I've been trying to hint at, without saying it
outright until now, is that we -- academic and non-academic readers alike --
may have been wrong to ignore the relevance of Pynchon's Catholic upbringing
to his work as a writer.  Jules was the first to suggest its relevance --
although he, too, did not go into it at any length -- in his Playboy
article.  So yes, the biographical stuff does matter and can illuminate.  I
am old enough to have been caught, in my education,
exactly at the cusp between modernist critical theories a la I.A. Richards
and structuralist/poststructuralist re-inforcements of modernism (e.g.
Barthes' death of the author thing you alluded to in a previous posting).
Even as a callow undergraduate in an old-fashioned British university
program, I thought the gentlemen (and the few ladies among them) did protest
too much.  Eliot's (and Joyce's) "impersonality" theory can cover up a
multitude of sins; has anyone been following the recent brouhaha in England
over a new book on Eliot's anti-Semitism?  It seems to have been torpedoed
by a concerted series of critical establishment actions -- though I don't
believe that it'll stay sunk for very long.  I could add things about
Barthes and the difficulty of acknowledging Balzac's influence, but my
messages are long enough as it is.

Back To _V_, though: you've probably made this connection yourself already,
but in case it got by you, it might be nice to compare the figure and
ideological function of V. (the character) with the false Mary in Lang's
_Metropolis_.  Lang's woman-machine stirs up the workers to revolt
against capitalist factory-owners; the ensuing mayhem and destruction of
property is finally stopped when the true Mary (am I inventing these names
or was it as unsubtle as that?) comes on the scene and effects a fittingly
moving reconciliation between the capitalist factory-bosses and the
proleterian underclass.  Everyone lives happily ever after.  And, to tie
this in with feminism, Pynchon, politics and the politics of representation
(however passe it might be at the moment), consider the fate Pynchon assigns
to Leni Pokler in _GR_.  To have Leni, a highly sympathetic
Red Rosa figure (who else could be the historical original -- except,
possibly, Kathe Kollowitz?), end up working as a prostitute: the unkindest
cut of all, with some fairly bizarre (or is it disturbing) implications
about Pynchon's politics.

Finally, one of the books Pynchon has written blurbs for in the last 7-8
years is a piece by a very well known Jungian (whose name I must be
repressing right now).  It never ceases to amaze me that Jungians have
managed to make the sort of popular come-back they have effected --
especially in North America -- and especially with very many people who
consider themselves sympathetic to feminism.  Jungian schemata lend
themselves very well to mythopoetic treatments of history, of course, and
his archetypes can usefully be understood as psyche's crude cartoons.  One
of the two doyennes of contemporary Jungian psychoanalysis is the
Canadian Marion Woodman, notorious by now for her (continuing, I understand)
collaborations with Robert Bly.  The other is Jean Houston, who, I was much
depressed to learn, is the current "spiritual adviser" to the White House!
And *her* politics, if you bother to dig just a teeny- weeny bit under the
surface, are truly scary.  Lots of Nietzsche, lots of open admiration for
the likes of Napoleon and Alexander the Great, and a generous sprinkling of
references to what she calls the "people of the break-through."  Houston is
bosom buddies with the Jungian whose name I continue to repress and whose
book is graced by that Pynchon blurb: sometimes I wonder about the company
he's chosen to keep.

All of which keeps me puzzled: a litle wary, a little confused, a little
sad, a little angry. In about that order.  The prose, and I admit I am a
sucker for that heavy, sensuous, luscious baroque Pynchon dishes out so
seemingly effortlessly, keeps me reading though.  And hoping, like you
Diana, that _Mason & Dixon_ will prove me if not wrong at least precipitous.

Vaska Andjelkovic
vaska at geocities.com