MDMD(2): Readerly Deflation & Seduction (Chap 5 & 7)

Eric Alan Weinstein E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk
Thu Jul 3 12:42:29 CDT 1997


At 10:26 02/07/97 -0400, you wrote:

>Good 'un. And Eric's, too, although I began to twitch at "the nature of the
>self, the Other, relationship, intersubjectivity, etc..." Why the twitch? (...)
> I care passionately about this "epistemology" of
>fiction: how authors manoeuvre us into and out of not only characters' and
>narrators' consciousness, but their systems of belief, trust and
>plausibility. And so I plunged eagerly into many, many articles and books
>that promised to tell me more about "unreliable narrators."
>And found, all too often, second-rate philosophy instead of insight into
>the fictions, which were treated as springboards to Deep Thought With Its
>Very Own Hegelian Hermeneutic.(...)

    Yes, Monte has a point here, and I wish to restate, in a different form,
some of what I experienced on p 42 and 43 of chapter five, and compare
this with what I experienced between p62-66 of chapter seven. Instead
of concentrating of the notion of deflation, I wish to clarify where it occurs
and add the perhaps useful notion of seduction.

     Let me start by saying that it is in fact me, the reader, who with my 
particular quirks and interests in  intersubjectivity in modern existential
thought  is "seduced" by the line (perhaps hook, line and sinker?) on 
p 42:

    "In the crucial moments, neither Mason nor Dixon had fail'd
the Other. Each had met the Other's Gaze for a slight moment
before Duty again claimed them---"


     Now if I had bothered to edit my post for clarity and accuracy,
which I did not do in order to keep to my "one hour rule" about
time spent on the internet per night, I would 1) not have made it sound
as if Monte was talking about Levinas, Heidegger, Sartre et. al, for
all that was and is my own interest.. Monte had pointed out the flip/flop
nature of relationship. 2) I would have realised that the most accurate 
location of the deflation which followed in the wake of 

   "----'we should be happy to proceed to war upon any people,
in any quarter of the Globe his Majesty should be pleas'd to 
send us to,--' "
    
happened in me, the deflated reader who had been seduced
on the page before. Indeed, I would guess that Pynchon's
present position on philosophy in literature would be closer to
Monte's than to mine, and the joke is on readers like me
and not readers like Monte. (That doesn't mean that my 
position may not prove fruitful---if I didn't think it might,
of course, I wouldn't be taking it.)

    Now this (good-natured) seduction and deflation aimed 
at the reader as much as the characters within the novel can lead
to the quiet kind of inward laughter which I experienced in
Chapter 5. What happens during chapter 7, however, is of a
different order and magnitude.

      Chapter seven is clearly about Seduction and Resistance
on a variety of levels, sexual, political, ethical, linguistic, etc.,
and will be the focus of far more critical insight than I am 
able to offer here. But let me merely say that Pynchon's
frontier folk and ripped bodices are no simple merry diversion.
The early part of the chapter is written in such a way as
it is easy to read it over too quickly, being seduced by the
seemingly good-natured sexual frolic. A little hair-brush S &M,
a little pubescent lap-sitting, no harm done. Right? Except
it is all a plot involving the value of black and white flesh.
It is an economic and evil little seduction. Like the soft 
pornography of advertising, the Vrooms' do not offer sex but
only its continuing deferral and displacement, never offering
the relief of sex except as profitable commodity through their
submissive partner in the commercial venture, Shaula. She is
indeed both the commercial womb and the sting in the scorpion's
tale above the night sky of Cape Town. That sting in the tale
is a sting in my tale too, oh all to willing to be seduced reader
that I am, for my readerly deflation brought me back to re-examine
the cold-brass-tacks that underlie all the arrangements
at the Cape colony. 

     If one looks for an image of deflation which, instead of causing
ethical re-examination, is re-absorbed as twisted self-denying perversion,
 my goodness, how about this one of Corn Vroom at his wife's door.
She is:

    "Kept tun'd to her own dangerous Pitch thro' the attentions of
      a number of young slave-girls chosen for their good looks---
     they haunt her, whisking the flies from her skin, oiling it when 
      the South-easter makes it dry as Pages of a Bible, draping it 
      with silks from India and France. They feed her pomegranates,
      kneeling quickly to lick off the juice that runs down her hands
       before it reaches her sleeve. Cornelius has a Peep in from time
        to time. Though he usually departs with an Erection, it is 
       possible that he is feeling the pain of an ineptly shot beast..." 
                                                  ( p. 68)

    This perhaps brings us back to the tales of the Botha brothers
shooting big game, which I take it included the Hottentots, and
Corny keeping a gun under his bed waiting for whispers from 
the nearby slaves, strictly forbidding his daughters even to 
eat Malay food.. Meanwhile, repressed in his mind, the knowledge
that his wife seems to enjoy lesbian encounters with her black
slaves.  Not only is sex mixed in with capital, but it is mixed
with the near-very-repressed racial fear and violence. Sexual 
frustration as tool, weapon, and missing signifier along the
chains of violence and bondage. 

   To end this little first investigation into the fascinating chapter 7,
does anyone else hear an echo of Nelson Mandela's "The Struggle
Is My Life" in the following, from Dixon on p.67:

     "They are not as happy, or as childlike, as they seem(...)It may
     content us, as unhappy grown Englishmen, to think that some-
     where in the World, Innocence may yet abide,---yet 'tis not
      among these people. All is struggle,--- and all but occasionally
      in vain."   
        


Eric Alan Weinstein
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk





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