Harper Valley PTA Report

[Henry M]

I think you're on the mark there, David. The catalog of the 
orgy-scene is one of the coldest "acts" I've ever witnessed -- the 
rounded scene with Bianca one of the most passionate in Pynchon's 
writing. Reminds me a little of advertising that shows pretty, 
hairless legs, and then quickly zooms back to show it belongs to a 
young girl: aren't we ashamed...

On 29 Jan 97 at 9:53, David Casseres wrote:

> 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 arrAnd
> 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 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
> 
> 

My mother was of the sky... -- JL
My mother is the war...
Keep cool, but care. -- TRP
Moderation in moderation. -- Husky Mariner
Not having that, which having... :-(

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