Why Sista be messin wit the Devil

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, November 29, 2003 4:02 PM
Subject: Re: Why Sista be messin wit the Devil


> Don't nobody don't know God can't tell me nothin bout no Adam and Eve
> and all dat.
>
> This master narrative stuff misses the point.

This is what a lot of postmodernism is about, deconstructing master
narratives. And binary oppositions like good and evil, day and night, right
and wrong, man and woman, master and servant, above and below -- which are
the core of master narratives:

"Back then, long ago, there were no men at all. Paradise was female. Eve and
her sister, Lilith, were alone in the Garden. A character named Adam was put
into the story later, to help men look more legitimate, but in fact the
first man was not Adam - it was the Serpent . . .
"It was sleazy, slippery man," Rochelle continued, "who invented 'good' and
'evil,' where before women had been content to just be. In among the other
confidence games they were running on women at the time, men also convinced
us that we were the natural administrators of this thing 'morality' they'd
just invented. They dragged us all down into this wreck they'd made of the
Creation, all subdivided and labeled...." (166).

What Sister Rochelle is doing here is presenting just another myth, the
female version of the creation story. But feminism simply reverses the poles
of the opposition, thus is just as wrong as the patriarchal myth.

> If we gonna go wit it, don't but two people really know what really
> happen. And Sista don't know. Sista  is a fake. It ain myths whats
> controlling, it's the people that keep tellin them when they ain got no
> business (really that's all they got is business if you follow me) to be
> tellin them.  Like a lot of folk in Vineland, while she lookin to
> absolve herself and her Sistas of somethin somebody in his/her story
> pinned on her, she lookin for somebody else to blame. Blame it all on
> the Men.
> Now what we gonna do? The brother do the same thang they do.
>
> Another example of misreading Vineland:
>
> Totalizing Postmodernism:
> Master-narratives in Pynchon's Vineland
> By Bruce A. Sullivan
>
> Pynchon's most obvious critiques of master-narratives come in the form
> of
> Sister Rochelle's anecdotes. These anecdotes deconstruct various myths.
> Myths
> are master-narratives; they are mere stories that attempt to find truth
> in
> unexplainable phenomena. When myths are accepted and proliferated, they
> become mechanisms of control. For instance, the Biblical creation myth
> dictates that Eve ate the forbidden fruit and tempted Adam to do so as
> well. Adam eats
> the fruit, and hence, Paradise is lost to humankind. The misogyny in the
> creation
> myth is obvious; the myth allows for the oppression of women by blaming
> the
> fall of humankind on Eve (and by extension, all women). Sister
> Rochelle's first
> anecdote rewrites the creation myth ....
>
> This may be how Sista reads the bible or how Bruce A. Sullivan reads it
> but it ain in the bible. It's simply not in the book.
>
> It is definitely worth looking at. What does it actually say? Perhaps
> the most important myth in the West and most people have never bothered
> to read it. Pynchon did.

Well, I did read the Bible too and in all of my copies it's written the same
way. Dunno what kinda Bible you've got. If you're calling Sullivan's reading
a misreading I know now where your misreading(s) of the novel comes from.

Sullivan is right that Rochelle is rewriting the creation myth.
Sullivan is right that misogyny in the creation myth is obvious.

And Pynchon is in good company, read John Barth's "Chimera" -- Pynchon did.

Otto