SLSL "TSR" death & sex

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "pynchonoid" <pynchonoid at yahoo.com>
To: "Pynchon-L" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 1:37 AM
Subject: SLSL "TSR" death & sex

> re "TSR", in the Intro, TRP sez:
>
> "In 'The Small Rain' characters are found dealing with
> death in pre-adult ways. They evade: they sleep late,
> they seek euphemisms. When they do mention death they
> try to make with the jokes. Worst of all, they hook it
> up with sex."  (5)
>
> Again, if I read this correctly, Pynchon would seem to
> be bucking a trend, certainly in Hemingway, the author
> he seems to lampoon most savagely in "TSR".  I wonder
> if he means to say here that it's just not right to
> link sex and death?  That this is one of those things
> he mentioned a few paragraphs earlier in the Intro,
> another element of "most of what I dislike about my
> writing", that he continues to link sex and death in
> his writing up to the 1984 present day and he doesn't
> like that aspect of his writing?  Or that here in his
> first published story he just does it ineptly? Or
> something else?
>
> -Doug
>

To me it sounds more that he criticises treating the sex & death binary
(eros-thanatos) in an inadequate, unconscious pre-adult way. If serious
literature is about our "attitude towards death" it's inevitably about our
attitude toward sex too:

"At the heart of the story, most crucial and worrisome, is the defective way
in which my narrator (...) deals with the subject of death.When we speak of
"seriousness" in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward
death - how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they
handle it when it isn't so immediate." (SL Intro 5.13-19)

What do/does the characters/narrator say:

"(...) this circumstance might have driven more ordinary men to the point of
suicide (...)." (TSR 27.19-20)

"The death detail worked precisely, efficiently, like an assembly line.
Every once in a while one of the offloaders would turn aside to vomit, but t
he work flowed on smoothly."
(44.18-21)

"For ten hours they cruised around looking for dead. One they unhooked from
a barbed wire fence. It hung there like a foolish balloon, a travesty; until
they touched it and it popped, hissed and collapsed. They took them off
roofs, out of trees, they found them floating or tangled in the debris of
houses. Levine worked in silence like the others (...)" (47.28-33)

I would agree that this word choice could be called inappropriate given the
serious topic of death if one is such a harsh critic like Pynchon himself is
in his Intro:

"In _The Small Rain_ characters are found dealing with death in pre-adult
ways. They evade: they sleep late [*], they seek euphemisms. When they do
mention death they try to make with the jokes. Worst of all, they hook it up
with sex." (SL Intro 5.29-33)
[*carpe diem, tempus fugit, I'd say]

"When the tug pulled in around six to offload bodies, Levine walked off as
carelessly as he had climbed aboard." (TSR 48.5-6)

Confronted with the aftermath of the hurricane the characters act as if it
is a normal Saturday night, not, what would have been appropriate that
they're in the middle of an catastrophe:

"What's up?"
"Date," Levine said.
"Fine," Picnic said, "I like to see young people get together. It's real
exciting." Levine looked at him, dead serious. "No," he said. "No, I think
'sheer momentum' is better."
(48.19-24)

"In the midst of great death," (...) "the little death." (...) "In the midst
of *Life*. We are in death. Oh god." (50.31-33)

"Hey Levine," Baxter said, "I got laid tonight."
"Ah," Levine said. "Congratulations."
(51.3-5)

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