re Re: SLSL "TSR" Swamp Wench

[pynchonoid]

Scott Badger
>[....] I still don't see that  
>either
>Levine or Buttercup, individually or mutually, get
>any satisfaction 
>from the
>experience.

Can't disagree with you here, based on what Pynchon
puts on the page.  It's difficult to tell if Buttercup
is enjoying herself, the reader gets so little
information about her thoughts and emotions (same
reason it's impossible to do anything but speculate
about her attitudes towards race relations).  It seems
safe to assume that Levine reaches his destination
(even if he doesn't appear to be much engaged in the
journey), but Buttercup?  "she evoking a casually
protective feeling" wouldn't appear to describe a
woman lost in the throes of orgasm; the phrase gives
her instead a maternal dimension -- perhaps that's
what she gives the men in her life, mothering, and
they in turn give her the physical contact and
illusion of intimacy that she craves.

Whether Levine and Buttercup can ever get
"satisfaction" from sex in the world that Pynchon
depicts in this story (and continues to elaborate in
the rest of his work) is another interesting question,
one that Wilhelm Reich's work might help to
illuminate.

I still think that Buttercup is being treated too
harshly by some of the participants in this discussion
who are applying some stereotypes about Southerners
that just don't necessarily apply absent more
information about this young woman  -- sharing an
accent doesn't automatically mean sharing attitudes,
and it seems safe to assume Buttercup doesn't share
Dugan's aversion to Jews.

She seems to have complex feelings towards the town of
Creole and its inhabitants, within the town/campus
dynamic, and whatever her experience might be of
gossip or other responses of the townspeople to her
sexual behavior. It's a common experience for
survivors of a catastrophe to feel grateful that they
were spared, even as they guilty knowing that their
survival is possible only because others were not
spared -- it can become quite tangled up if the people
who were killed were also people who had abused the
survivor.

In the post-WWII setting of "TSR" it's  possible to
read this complex and contradictory survivor mentality
at work on a larger scale, as the survivors of WWII,
and the Korean War, process (they can't avoid it)
their experiences even as US culture as a whole sweeps
those nasty feelings under the rug and celebrates with
an unprecedented orgy of consumer spending, material
consumption, and imperial expansion. 

-Doug



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