Harper Valley PTA Report

[David Casseres]

Chris sez

>     Quoth Andrew re getting turned on by the naughty bits in GR:
>     
>     [snip]
>     
>     >Pynchon intends to do this to us. Remember Cructhfield making it 
>     >with everything except that rattlesnake then `lately he's been 
>     >getting interested in [it] too [...]  fangs just tickling the 
>     >foreskin [...]'. The slide into the `perverse' is so casual and 
>     >subtle you can easily go fall down along with it. And we are so use 
>     >to indulging ourselves in our 1st world luxury that we almost want 
>     >to fall down that slide. Yes, we are already perverted, not by sex 
>     >but by luxury.
>     
>     Hmm, "1st world luxury."  So, this is another device that Pynchon uses 
>      to make us reexamine our capitalist, supremacist tendencies?

My perverse habit of reading far ahead of the current GRGR section had me reading the "Anubis" section, with its orgies and pedophilia, just as the wave of debate about pornography crested.  Now that it's receded a bit, here's my 2 cents' worth, as a penance for having brought up Larry Flynt in the first place (though it was Craig who brought up pornography).

The whole passage aboard the Anubis follows and mirrors a longer section dealing with the miserable story of Franz Pökler, a preterite engineer at Peenemünde, and his daughter Ilse, on furlough from the concentration camp where she was sent with her mother in early childhood.  Or perhaps, or probably, it's not really Ilse at all, but a ringer sent in by Weissmann/Blicero as a way of manipulating Pökler.  And as she is reaching puberty Pökler is seized by a fantasy of having sex with her on one of their arranged meetings Zwölfkinder, a Nazi-run theme-park about childhood.  And that fantasy reaches back to when he watched a child-rape scene in one of Thanatz' (meaning "death") Weimar-decadent movies.

And though the fantasy is never realized it haunts the whole desperate relationship, which is unresolved as we segue back to Slothrop falling in the river and then being hauled aboard the orgy-boat Anubis to find guess who, Bianca (meaning "white"!), who was the child star of that very same child-rape scene, by whom he is immediately willing to be seduced in a scene made infinitely painful by being sexually graphic and yes, arousing with a level of erotic detail not found in any of the previous sex scenes in the book, while at the same time filled with more actual tenderness than Slothrop has ever shown or perhaps felt before, while at the same time filled with Slothrop's profound guilt (Slothrop? guilt? oh yes) coupled with his usual helplessness and the overwhelming aura of impending death or worse (yes worse) that surrounds the doomed child Bianca, whose own mother, Slothrop's previous sex-partner, is going to turn out in the very *next* linked section to be a ritual child-murderer.

This is pornography????  This is in some way comparable to what Larry Flynt publishes, or even to the cheesy and pretentious vileness of the infinitely over-invoked de Sade????  Surely not.  The two back-to-back passages mutually reflect in each other, like the bathroom mirrors in that toilet-ship described so carefully a little earlier, an infinite series of images of evil rooting itself in the most uncontrolled urges and reflexes in the animal soul.

But how does Pynchon end the passage?  Could it be a knotting-into?  Well sure: he suddenly steps up to the footlights, takes off his narrative mask, puts me, the reader, in an isolated seat in a dark movie theater where I am watching the *porno movie* that has just been written out, and addresses me in the second person, and preaches me a sermon just like any old Yankee Presbyterian, about what it is to be a spectator to such stuff.  His closing words are "Someone had to tell you."


Cheers,
David