V.V. (6) Esther's nose job (is Re: Comedy, pornography, and automata in TRP)

[jbor]

You make some interesting points. I'm more inclined to think that this 
reference to what could be Esther's "secret switch or clitoris somewhere
inside her nasal cavity" (109.3) is the text's dialectical rejoinder to the
just-previous depiction of Bongo-Shaftsbury's electrical on/off switch for
his conscience or morality (which seems to work like those cut-off switches
cars have nowadays). I get the impression that Pynchon here is perhaps
foregrounding one of the bio-mechanisms which is *part of* being "human" --
the sexual urge, the procreative impulse, that universal (?) biological
instinct to regeneration of the species -- rather than ceaselessly and
simply denouncing "dehumanisation". It's just a nose job, after all, a
cosmetic procedure, and no foreign material has been inserted into her body
(cf. those allografts inflicted on poor Godolphin). Jaime Sommers she ain't!

I very much agree with you about the putative progenitors of Benny's
schlemihlhood, however.

best

----------
>From: David Simpson <dsimpson at condor.depaul.edu>
>To: pynchon-l-digest at waste.org
>Subject: Comedy, pornography, and automata in TRP
>Date: Thu, Dec 21, 2000, 3:00 AM
>

>
> 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 pornnography (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 thhat 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.
>
>> --
>
>