Later, nerds

[Paul Mackin]

Thanks to Charles for picking up on this. I've got to reread his post a few more times. Not sure I get all the implications of who said what to whom and why. One thing did occur to me, and though I'm sure it's wrong, I'd better not hold back. Does Pynchon's writing somehow support the feminist viewpoint (assuming there is convergence on it) by virtue of being a horrible example of what's wrong with the world?

A few year's back a movie came out in which Woody somebody and Juliet somebody
played the parts of "Natural Born Killers."  A whole lot of completely senseless killing 
took place in the course of its two-hour plus running time. What was even more
memorable however was an interview in which the director was taken  to 
task for the gratuitousness of it all. His defense was simple.  The public needed to
understand the terrible state the world has gotten into.

Was browsing though DeLillo's Underworld today. Immediately came across
a passage in which a female character jumps right off the page. She actually
thinks, speaks and maybe even prevails upon a male character to change
his mind about something. Now Roger loves Jessica but does he ever listen to her?
Well OK who wants him to. That's not the point of the book. And even more
important Pynchon can write circles around DeLillo any day of the week. I know
I'm not going to waste my precious remaining eyesight reading 800 pages of
Don when I can reread the Tom.

In the end of course I side with Pynch against any conceivable charge that can
be brought against him. I'm an Aristotelian, a thorough believer in the power
of purgation no matter how many dead bodies lies on the stage as the curtain
descends. At the same time I'm very mixed up about the whole thing. How could
you Tom you old sot.

Going sailing tomorrow on the windswept Chesapeake Bay but will rejoin you
all Friday. I love you every bit as much as Charles does.

							P.

----------
From:  calbert at pop.tiac.net[SMTP:calbert at pop.tiac.net]
Sent:  Tuesday, September 30, 1997 2:06 PM
To:  Paul Mackin
Cc:  pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject:  RE: Later, nerds

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.  
> 
> 
>