Why HH never loved her

[Terrance]

"LATER than usual ... 1984, Zoyd through a creeping fig that hung in the
window ... HOME between shifts .... fig ..." 






The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not
merely
as a sentiment but as a force; why was she unknown in America? for
evidently
America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise
they
would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was
a true
force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made
American
female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The
trait was
notorious, and often humorous, but anyone brought up among Puritans knew
that
sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength.

    --OH HENRY 

Losing ones virginity signifies inscription into a system of
representations that structure relations, interpret responses, delineate
oppositions. The expression paradoxically constructs refusing to do
something as a presence, while making sexuality an absence or loss.
Seeming to impart value to virginity, it also defines power relations
between gendered partners that reveal how vulnerable women are in a
patriarchal society. The male is the seducer; he wins if he can pop the
cherry. The female is the seduced; symmetry requires that she win if she
can keep her virginity intact. In fact her virginity is useful only as
bargaining chip, for if she hangs on to it for too long it becomes
useless, a sign of a spinster that no one desires. Virginity is thus
valuable only as long as it is imperiled. Let the pressure diminish and
it loses its currency. Like money and information it needs to circulate
within a system of exchanges to exercise its value. Unlike them it is a
coin that can stand only one transaction before disappearing. Properly
speaking, it signals an initiation into the exchange of money and
information that follows. 

"Who was saved?" Families, Snitches, and Recuperation In Pynchon's
Vineland, 

N. Katherine Hayles 

pynchonoid wrote:
> 
> T:
> >So, dear Pynchonoid [...]
> 
> At least somebody is making an effort to relate Pale
> Fire to Pynchon -- quite tenuously in this anagram
> case, but an effort all the same.  Thanks.
> 
> =====
> <http://www.pynchonoid.org/>
> 
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