author's bios, etc

[matthew.percy at utoronto.ca]

On Sun, 27 Oct 1996, Diana York Blaine wrote:

> Thank you Roman!  your elegant posting helped me see the irony of my lack
> of interest in Pynchon's private life.  I, too, feel who wrote what and
> when are important issues to considering when analyzing literature--in
> fact my scholarship and pedagogy depend on it. During the last 2 weeks  my
> American lit survey course involved reading African-American author
> Langston Hughes and then seeing "Looking for Langston," a film about his
> homosexuality.  This was news to most students who then struggled in class
> discussion to renegotiate their relationship to the poetry with this
> (sadly unwelcome) knowledge in mind. We talked at length about whether
> it's our business, whether it matters, etc etc etc.  I guess the Pynchon
> stuff feels like minutiae, at least comparatively.  But your point is well
> taken, and I am looking critically at my own assumptions:  am I
> uninterested in the details because he is a straight white male and I
> "know what that means"? Talk about totalizing!  Glad for the nudge.
>     Speaking of which, even though I have just returned from a Southwest
> Airlines flight back from CA (if you have flown them you know what I am
> saying), I am so excited to see the discussion of feminism, parenthood and
> V. that I can't tear myself away.  Briefly:  in my diss I argue that V. is
> not postmodern but looking to reimpose at least one flagging metanarrative
> (Lyotard) in order to "shore up our ruins" a la Eliot.  That metanarrative

I'm really interested in what you have to say here.  I was just thinking 
w/r/t to _V._ how the text seems much more modernist than postmodernist, 
insofar as it seems to reach nostalgically for a prelapsarian past, as 
well as its thinly veiled attacks on its contemporaries (the Whole Sick Crew
as a satire of [commercialized] beat generation).  I was struck by one 
passage at the beginning of ch 12 in particular:
	There hung therefore about Raoul, Slab and Melvin's pad a climate 
of impermanence [i.e. postmodern sensibility], as if the sand-sculptures, 
unfinished canvases, thousand of paperback books suspended in tiers of 
cement blocks and warped planks, even the great marble toilet stolen from 
a mansion in the east 70s [Duchamp's fountain?  I think this is kinda 
telling, almost like Eagleton's critique of the apolitical and 
commodified postmodern recapitulation of avant-gardist/modernist principles]
since replaced by a glass and aluminu, apartment building [ sounds 
suspiciously like late-modernism/pomo archietecture to me].

 > would be, of course, conventional constructions of gender. V. 
is a
> woman/machine responsible for the destruction of the 20 century--she's
> also a mother, and when I saw the discussion of children I of course
> thought of Stencil, who is the adult-child-of-a-castrating-bitch (I don't
> know if there's a support group for this.  Could be.) Stunningly sexist?
> Yes. I think so.  And for good reason.  If the world is as awful as TRP
> posits it--and I know y'all probably find his argument as compelling as
> I--then the impulse to make stability becomes even more intense than in
> periods of relative ease (hence Vineland, which I admit I set down with a
> thud and a yuck--please God let Mason Dixon crank!!!!!!).  Attracted to
> and disgusted by the mother (and the mother's body) Stencil both can and
> cannot approach her for she's forbidden to him as male subject.  (Sorry
> about the psychobabble John 

Ithink "psychobabble", part. Lacan would be pretty useful for analyzing 
the novel's epilogue (which is very misogynist)- Pynchon;'s caricature of 
V. as lesbian needing to be continually defined by male gaze (her need t 
be seen/see herself in the endless  mirrors of the epilogue)...haven't 
examined this fully, though it's pretty clear that Pynchon's in to trying 
to define V. as madonna/whore (to me at least).  

-Matt

but it's what my 
fancy UCLA education learned
> me how to do best).  Anyway sorry to go on at length but I am terribly
> impressed by the list's members (ac and non-ac alike) and would love
> comments. I promise credit when I publish the book!  thanks, Diana
> 
>