Masturbation and Virgins

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Pynchon's use of sexual acts and or the failure of sexual
acts are complicated. The empty ones for example, have all
sorts of sex, none of them procreative. If we go back to V.,
we have the story of various young people getting together.
What happens? Do they get it on? No, Benny I'm Cherry, she
says, but Benny simply rests a drink on her naked body, as
if the girl desperate for sex, was only another coffee
table.  On the other hand, how about Lowlands? What's
happening with the moon and sterility and that little elf
girl? These are the Waste Land Stories. On one level in GR,
sexual activities are part of a larger  political or
cultural critique and Pynchon is given a little life to the
waste land. In Small Rain, Lardass makes love to Little
Buttercup in the Waste Land Sun after the Farewell to Arms
Rain. Both the rain and the sun are signs of sterility and
death in this story. No escape, no love making, the
temperature will not change.  How about Blicero's "love" and
the Rocket? Here love and sex and the rocket are associated
with Blicero and by extension technology and control. This
Rocket seems, like that mad bus driver of the System to run
on its own. Pynchon, I think, is  critiquing a technology of
war which is so far out of control that it seems to be
serving purposes of its own. It's serving its own purpose
because society has become so dumb, so routine, so
mechanized, so technological, that technology is now
controlled by a System that controls the citizens.  But it
is also a critique of 500 years of history. The stakes are
high, what is to be real and who is decide what is real. Who
will give the System its new Virgin? People would die for
the Virgin or build cathedrals to glorify her Virginity.
Tchitcherine says, ""The basic problem
has always been
getting other people to die for you
.That's where religion
had the edge, for centuries
" And Pointy says soldiers are
very useful, like foxes, dogs, old men, children, but first
control is required and Virginity is not going to work, not
when the Symbol of the new religion is a Rocket. So how does
one sexualize the machinery of death? How can we get all the
citizens to work for the new Virgin? I know, how about a
little S&M, a little dominance and submission. Pynchon is a
funny guy, not rigid and preachy like a church sermon, more
like the bible---do people still read the bible for its
stories, it wild stories, its grotesque, eroticisms? Anyway,
Pynchon likes these wild, grotesque erotixcisms and so we
find the  Rocket: "fifty feet high, trembling . . .     and
then the fantastic, virile roar . . . Cruel, hard, 
thrusting into the virgin-blue robes of the sky . . . Oh, so
phallic" says Thanatz . Katje  learns from those that "use
her" that the Rocket has been "programmed in a Ritual of
Love.. at Brenschluss it is done-the Rocket's purely
feminine counterpart, the zero point at the center of its
target, has submitted." Paradoxically, this emblem of sexual
violence and death promises a kind of eternal life, by
transforming nature, where death and decay are the normal
course of things, into something not in nature's sphere.
What's the problem with Blicero's reading of Rilke? This is
a key to the novel. How can the fecundity of scatter brained
mother nature be conquered by the Rocket? "Beyond simple
steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away
from the feminine darkness,  held against the entropies of
lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature . . ."  An
imitation of life, a pornography. Pornography is the tool of
the system and it gets people to work and die for the
Rocket. Like the sick crew in V., sex is best with a machine
or in some non or anti procreative way, so the system, like
the Nazi propaganda system deflects sexuality away from man
and towards an economy of objectified images. Remember, "an
army of lovers can be beaten." What is an army of lovers?
What is love? I don't know, but I think lovers want to live,
have children maybe, make love, keep cool and care, be kind,
those kind of things, but these lovely things, like great
art and beautiful music and Pynchon novels are not useful to
the system. "It's true . . . look at the forms of capitalist
expression. Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic
love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of
sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of
deduction -- ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer --
all these novels, these films and these songs that they lull
us with, they're approaches, more comfortable and less so,
to that Absolute Comfort. . . . The self-induced orgasm.

The self induced orgasm, is physical and emotional,
intellectual, metaphysical, in the system. The monkey
spanker is the perfect citizen of the system. He or she is
alone, or if they are not they can be, why with the film
running, the images give all that is needed to everyone,
spiritual, "Christian love", aesthetic "sunsets", and
intellectual "ah, that sigh when we guess the murderer". So
who needs a warm lover? Why reach out and touch someone in
that cold theatre and threaten the effectiveness of the
"structures favoring death" by affirming the value of life. 


TBC

TF