blicero's sexuality

[jbor]

----------
>From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
>

> ***We need first, to define in what sense these sexual acts
> are said to be perverse sexual acts, unnatural sexual acts,
> in the fiction.***
>
>
> Eddins does this for us.

snip

This is the point, Terrance. Eddins defines what is "perverse" and
"unnatural", what are "violations" of some apparently absolute natural
"order", and how "human imagination" and "natural instinct" are somehow
opposite phenomena, and then he attempts to overlay all this baggage on the
text. However, they ultimately remain his definitions, not the text's.

Your attempted distinction between the depiction of individual people and
cultures in fiction and the individual people and cultures that such
depictions are said to represent doesn't really hold water, particularly as
it's a commonplace which you seem to accept when you are offering your own
interpretations of the texts.

Fictional or no, the characters, their behaviours and sexual practices, and
whatever these are interpreted as representing in the "real" world, are not
"condemned" by either Pynchon (or "the text") within the text. They are in
fact "condemned" by *readers* of the text, such as Eddins and yourself in
this particular instance.

That balance sheet of "good" and "evil" characters which some readers
attempt or need to construct is always a process of their interpretation of
the text. I take Kai's point that Hedwig's (or Bianca's, or, indeed,
Blicero's) "squalid hypersexuality" being opposed to Paola's or Fina's (or
Gottfried's) apparently innocent (though perhaps equally "hyper") sexuality
is very artificial and arbitrary, and perhaps indeed both mono-contextual
and xenophobic into the bargain.

Pynchon has announced his admiration of Oakley Hall's _Warlock_ on a couple
of occasions. I think one of the strong themes which emerges in that novel
is marvellously encapsulated by something which the sometime narrator, Henry
Holmes Goodpasture (stuffy and prejudiced though he also at times proves
himself to be), writes in his journal very early on there: "For what are
Right & Wrong in the end, but opinion held to?" (his caps)

best