Later, nerds

[calbert at pop.tiac.net]

There seems to be some consensus that P short changes his women 
characters. Never noticed it myself, but as the archives will reveal, 
I am apparently insensate.
Not having ready access to any great library, I picked up my old copy 
of MINDFUL PLEASURES, ESSAYS ON THOMAS PYNCHON (Levine&Leverenz, 
Editors), now more than 20 years old.

An essay entitled, BRUNNHILDE AND THE CHEMISTS: WOMEN IN GRAVITY'S 
RAINBOW, contains the following:
'To inquire of the maker of such a fiction... if he perceives the 
role of women as richly and as dreadfully, as comically and as 
tenderly, with as equal a share of hate and fear and pity as he views 
the role of men is the question I have been asked to explore in this 
paper. With no puns on Forster's distinctions intended, are the 
female characters as "round" as the male? Or are they assigned only 
the male oriented stereotypical role: La Belle Dame Sans Merci and 
for that matter, the flipped coin of that powerfully destructive, 
monstrous beauty, the equally stereotypical role perceived by the 
raised consciousness of NOW, the passive, even willingly enslaved 
object of male sexual gratification?Does Thomas Pynchon, ....Given 
such leisure, such space, such time, does he also give a fair shake 
to his women characters, to the female sex?

An immediate answer has seemed obvious to me, and consistent, for 
Pynchon's three novels (V, GR, CoL49): yes, of course he does. A full 
and considered response, however, has proved more labyrinthine than I 
was wise enough to suspect; though fundamentally unchanged, it can at 
least serve the purpose of running us deep into the ways and whys 
of GR, to its center, as cold as the last circle of Dante's Hell or 
of Werner von Braun's outer space with its certifiably sterile moon."

The author concludes as follows:
" Well, what to make of all this? In a letter protesting Susan 
Sontag's apparent failure to make "important sexual/political 
connections", the poet Adrienne Rich asks a series of questions, 
felicitously pertinent to this novel(GR):

'What are the themes of domination and enslavement, prurience and 
idealism, male physical perfection and death, "control, submissive 
behavior, and extravagant effort", "the turning of people into 
things."...the objectification of the body as separate of the 
emotions - what are these but masculinist, virilist, patriarchal 
values? (ed. " Ms Rich, have you met Mittel?") Isn't the black 
leather, brothel, exstacy in death fantasy far less a lesbian fantasy 
than a fantasy of heterosexual males and the male homosexuals they 
oppress?'

If what Ms. Rich means is that male-oriented literature supports 
those "themes" as positive values, then P's GR, as a whole, can be 
read as a thinly disguised treatise written to support the views of 
radical feminism and its analyses of "patriarchal history" and 
"patriarchal society". It is downright anti-"masculinist", and Thomas 
Pynchon differs from Rich's view only in the depth of his compassion 
and love for victor and victim alike. BUT SUCH A READING COMMITS 
VIOLENCE TO THE NOVEL. AS THE GRIMMER OF PYNCHON"S 
CHARACTERS INSIST ON PERVERTING COORDINATING SYSTEMS
INTO CAUSE AND EFFECT RELATIONSHIPS, SO MS. RICH'S 
CONFLATION OF EVENTS TURNS THE COMPLEX WORLD INTO A
SIMPLISTIC DOGMA OF SEXUAL MEANS AND ENDS.(Hello, Davemarc)....
In such a world, what is to say that, after all, the contributions of 
the sexes are equally dismaying? For I've meant to show they are 
viewed as equal collaborators- knowingly, willingly, or not."

The author? Marjorie Kaufman, at that time, the Emma Kennedy 
Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.

sorry to be so long winded on her behalf.
love,
cfa , who wonders if Cat Stevens has been rehabilitated yet.

> Mantaray writes:
> It's about time some women took you and Pynchon to the wall.
> 
> It's about time for someone of either sex to take P to the wall. Would clear
> the air. Attempts in the past have aborted early on. A sort of ritual reluctance
> inevitably sets in. But P would have nothing to fear and we could only gain.
> 
> Or am I fuller of it than usual?
> 
> 								P.  
> 
> 
>