GRGR(5) War and sex

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

> ginnetti wrote:
>
> > One theme we might wish to discuss is the conflation of war and sex (not
> > that this is new at this point, and not coincidentally introduced
> > through Roger and Jessica) particularly through the description of war
> > in sexualized terms.  I think of Slothrop and his possibly psychokinetic
> > misogony, Pointsman and The Book, and then Pointsman's fetishization of
> > conditioning. . . and so on.  Of course, the Pointsman passage here is
> > taken to its extreme in the next episode.
>
> Paul wrote:
>
> An interesting change from V. is that the sex/war/colonial stuff now
> has a much more predominant weighting toward the homoerotic in it.




Like Slothrop, the more V. functions as an abstract entity (a golem if you
will), the more inanimate and non-human she becomes. The two processes
(functioning as abstract entity and becoming inanimate) are coextensive. V.’s
changing identity drives some of the major themes of the novel—history,
politics, race, manifest destiny, and so on, with sexual
perversions—Enfetishment and Voyeurism. All of  these themes are reworked in
GR and can be found in TCOL49 and the SL stories. The Secret Integration is my
favorite, because it introduces these major Pynchon themes in raw form.
Reading The Secret Integration is like reading drafts of a poem. We can learn
how the poet revised and reworked a verse and sometimes note when the muse has
touched the top of the poet’s ink stick and brought the enchantment and genius
that the finished work manifests. Such raw material or poetry in progress is
Pynchon’s Secret Integration. It’s all there, themes, techniques, names,
humor, puns, and so on, and so on. Pynchon’s “voice,” for example, which to my
ear, is always the same, in his prose and his fiction, is there. Let me give
one example, that ties into both V., and Slothrop.  Carl Barrington, a black
boy, new to the white community functions as an abstract entity and becomes
more inanimate as the story proceeds.

>From the last page or two of The Secret Integration:

Carl had been put together out of phrases, images, possibilities that grownups
had somehow turned away from, repudiated, left out at the edges of towns, as
if they were auto parts in Etienne’s father’s junkyard—things they could or
did not want to live with but which the kids, on the other hand, could spend
endless hours with, piecing together, rearranging, feeding, programming,
refining. He was entirely theirs, their friend and robot, to cherish, buy
undrunk sodas for, or send into danger, or even, as now, at last, to banish
from their sight.

The sexual motifs are played by McAfee, a Jazz man alcoholic, that the boys
have an AA meeting with.

To be continued
.

Terrance