Pornography

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> 
> Entropy is OK. I don't like my struggle between Sex and Death statement all
> that much because it is too limited in scope to take in  the  intimate relation
> between sex and aggression. If sex is the instinct to produce life, aggression
> and death are required to protect life.  There 's a limited food supply after
> all. Sadism may be the way this connection shows up. Some degree of sadism has
> to be expected in the average person. 


Freud and his Psychoanalytic theories and concepts,
including,  Sex, aggression, and self-preservation, fathers
and mother, stages of sexual development, are all twisted
into Pynchon's encyclopedic orgy here. Pynchon does not
simply apply Sigmund Freud or Carl Gustav Jung or J.P.
Sartre, or Herbert Marcuse or Norman O. Brown. Pynchon
combines  theories and concepts, biography, history,
politics, science and technology myths, allusions, comedy
and tragedy, to satirize the state of the West and admonish
the Americans in particular. Pynchon is no moral relativist
spinning webs of complexity to delight and not instruct. .
Is there something didactic, instructive, here? Well, some
say Pynchon is instructing the reader: Instructing us on how
to read postmodern fiction. I think Pynchon does not so much
to turn the mirror from Nature to Reading (some S&M reader
author relationship), but as instruction, albeit by taking
the reader into the fun house, a  carnivalized and mirrored
world of human behavior,  to satirize, and instruct, and
present his moral position.   Humorous (cK)ute
(cK)orresepondences disruptive and subversive (for example,
Slothrop--Anubis, Osiris, Orpheus,  phallus, Freud, Jonah) 
are not simply calling attention to themselves here, but
rather indicative of Pynchon's distrust of the human
tendency ("fatally fallen"/doubly post-lapsarian)  to
establish systems that reduce "pornographically" perceptual
differentiation ("paranoia) by repressing and denaturing
Nature and Humanity in the process. On a social level  this 
leads to a repressive technocratic system, a total and
totalizing System won away from the entropies of lovable but
scatter-brained mother earth. Mothers and Fathers, Family
surrenders to the state, and the state is an incestuous
sodomizing system--Death.