The Zone, and what about those girls (was Re: GRGR (15): Enzian, nihilism, and a few other things

[rj]

M.Perez
> GR, it
> seems to me, is almost nothing but displaced people.  Indigenous people
> in colonial bondage are displaced in their own land.  Emigrants are
> strangers in another culture and can't create a home away from home

Although, those Argentinian anarchists have sought just such a zone, and
the Schwarzkommando thrive here. And, Slothrop is "free" when he
embraces this type of displacement. I think this is another one of those
preconceptions/moral 'determinants' that *GR* is giving the reader pause
to reconsider. 

Later, despite the satiric overtones, ancestor William Slothrop's
"heresy" is entertained and prolonged by the narrative:

Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular
point she had jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy
had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might there have been fewer
crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas
Iscariot? It seems to Tyrone Slothrop there might be a route back --
maybe that anarchist he met in Zurich was right, maybe for a little
while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole
space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste
of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect,
without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up. . . . (556)

Well, maybe this is just the leading edge of another brand of utopian
idealism, ready to go sour with the first gestures of bureaucratisation
(the speaking of it, here, in Slothrop's head ... )

Anyway, what strikes me more and more in this reading is the feminist
subtext of the novel. Back in Part 1 it turned out that Jessica was the
one who, by virtue of her displacement from the male machinations going
on all around I guess, was able to command that angel's-eye perspective
and bring the English experience of the War into sharper *human* focus
(the Advent sequence particularly). I think in Sections 2 and 3 so far
it is Katje and Leni who perceive what's what more than any of the male
protagonists. Partly, they are able to do this because they remain
detached from all the intrigues -- not only because this chauvinistic
society of cartels and counterforces does not recognise them as players
but merely as pawns/objects to be played with, but also because they
have different *human* agendas and priorities to the males (sensual,
compassionate). The males are caught up with "Science" and "Politics"
and "War" and "Power/Fear" and all those other species of
phallogocentric "Control". But the women recognise that they have
nothing to gain and nothing to lose from all this shenanigans. They also
realise that individual males, like Slothrop, or Pudding, have just as
little to gain. But the boys don't see this. Social individuation as
"male" within the Western patriarchy is dependent on "Power" and
"Control", both domestically and territorially. It's all a huge pissing
contest: my rocket/dick is bigger than yours, u.s.w.

I think back in *V.* Pynchon fell into the trap of still believing the
macho bullshit himself to an extent, and he sold the female characters
short in that novel: Esther's nose job, Rachel's MG, Paola, the Bad
Priest & Melanie etc, are all subsidiary to the specifically male dramas
carried on on centre stage. The objectification of women under the
patriarchy should be a theme but isn't quite in that novel. In *Lot 49*
he tries to rectify this but Oedipa comes across as a peculiarly sexless
creature, an autodidactic consciousness without gender specificity, and
so the narrative transvestitism falls flat somewhat. But, sneakily, in
*GR* the women reclaim something like the role of the chorus in a Greek
tragedy. Because women were still an underclass during the period in
which this avidly historicist novel is set Pynchon couldn't manipulate
the plot as such, so the feminist thrust of the text operates through
unremitting parody of the patriarchy, and, surreptitiously, by mediating
narrative agency through feminine perspectives.

Civil rights, environmentalism, anti-racism, feminism -- is Pynchon the
prince of p.c postmodernism?

best