Pynchon's men

[Otto]

Right on, good post. I agree.

Otto

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 20, 2002 6:01 PM
Subject: Re: Pynchon's men


> I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my
> earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in
> me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands
> here. 
> 
> --M-D
> 
> Ahab's dediance of lightning, his assertions over and against nature,
> are claims to his American heritage--romantic individualism and manhood. 
> 
> Better to sink in boundless depths, than float on vulgar shores. 
> 
> --Mardi
> 
> "Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven." 
> 
> --Paradise Lost
> 
> And is it any mystery why the Romantics, who took Milton's Satan for
> their hero, went looking for paradise in America? 
> 
> In Blake's visions America is cut off from the world, seperated by the
> great seas. It is the isolated womb of Revolution (Orc) and it
> represents Liberty (of the body from sexual repression, law, empire,
> history's bad shit and its curses).  
> 
> On man Adam, one man Noah, one man Job, one man Abraham, one man John,
> one greater man Jesus. This solitary individual  in the west is as old
> as bread. Ayan Rand did not invent him or as some would say, try. She
> tries to create the greater man, but fails. 
> And Ayn Rand was an atheist and a women. 
> And Rand condemned conservatism as a different form of collectivism, one
> that attempted to validate its core philosophy with religion and
> tradition. Of course conservatives, particualrly American ones,
> condemned Rand for her atheism.
> Pynchon has been critisized for the same weakness, he can't create
> living characters. When he comes close, his characters are men,
> solitary, individual men against the evil gods, at the mercy of the
> conspiring gnostics, infected by the evils that men do and pass on in
> their nightmares and in their genes. 
> 
> Herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the
> rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virute of interioir
> spaciousness. Oh Man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou,
> too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without
> being of it...Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great
> whale, retain, O Man! in all seasons a tempeture of thy own. 
> 
> --M-D
> 
> But Pynchon and Melville wrote novels that Ayn Rand, being an Atheist
> and a women, could not even imagine. All that testoserone, all that
> hunting and questing, all that Don Juanism, all that rebellion against
> the gods, all that isolated heroics, is the stuff that men are made of.
> American men in particular, but not only American men.  
> If Pynchon had not written his Moby-Dick (a combination of the white
> rocket of GR and the homoerotic brotherhood of M&D), his novel V., that
> half spun yarn with the female protagonist, and that nostalgiac
> political sitcom would not hold our attention for long. We are, after
> all, most of his readers, men.

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