Comedy, pornography, and automata in TRP

[David Simpson]

> Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2000 10:15:41 +1100
> From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
> Subject: Re: VV(6) - Flesh for Frankenstein
>
> The image of Esther's sex-switch (109.2) echoes, metaphorically at least
> (--"Trench's gift for metaphor", another fine joke--), Bongo-Shaftsbury's
> actual electric switch back in Ch 3 too. Again, here it seems that the human
> sexual instinct is being depicted as a mechanical, rather than an organic
> urge.

Indeed, there seems to be a lot of "mechanical" sex in Pynchon -- as in contemporary culture generally. It is by now a cliché to observe that soul-less, automatic sex is the essence of pornography (in a porn video, the actors aren't so much "meat" as machinery: a bunch of pistons, valves, rods, and cylinders operating at
high-speed and in endless cyclic repetition.) What hasn't been commented on to a large extent is what a mirthful, zestful, ingenious pornographer Pynchon is. Nobody is better at presenting broad, farcical, physically mechanical, indeed virtually Newtonian, sex than TRP.

I believe the motive behind such stuff is three-fold: First, it allows Pynchon to extend his metaphor of the inanimate and its deathly clutchings into the world of life; an invasion that threatens even sex, the very heart and soul of the animate. Second, there's the sheer hilarity of it. As Bergson in his essay "On Laughter"
was one of the first to emphasize, a certain mechanical repetitiveness and inflexibility, an almost machinelike determination and indestructibility (think of Mr. Magoo, Chaplin's tramp, the Three Stooges, or Wile E. Coyote) is a keystone of comedy. Profane, as schlemiel, is Pynchon's brilliant contribution to this comic
type: Benny falls victim to inanimate mechanisms with unerring mechanical regularity.

But the real motive (I think) behind the mechanical sex in Pynchon is simply to make the point -- often lost in our cultural haze of back-to-nature therapies, Playboy and Hustler, 60's politics, and Wilhelm Reich -- is that sex alone isn't going to create nirvana, recover Eden, or even make you human. To become fully human
and alive is a much larger and more demanding project.

> --

"It's not dark yet...but it's gettin' there." -- Bob Dylan.
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homepage: http://www.depaul.edu/~dsimpson