Action, Jackson!

[Dave Monroe]

>From Dana Medoro, "Traces of Blood and the Matter of a
Paraclete's Coming: The Menstrual Economy of Pynchon's
V.," Pynchon Notes 44-45 (Spring-Fall 1999), pp. 14-34
...

   "While the patriarchal legacies in V. attempt to
write and perpetuate themselves across the idealized,
passive female body, V.'s is not necessarily a
maternal or material power .... Although Maijstral's
memoirs (his legacy to his daughter) circulate around
an obsession with the maternal feminine, matriarchy
cannot be patriarchy's alternative in the text; it is
only an inverse reflection of Maijstral's anxiety
about a world at war....  This anxiety is displaced
onto a V.-figure, whom he believes to be in some way
occasioned by the war .... her scattered pieces
reemerge in the hands of other women.  These women, as
manifestations of V., appear throughout the novel as
prostitutes, virgins, mothers, lesbians, nuns.
   "What cuts across each representation of female
sexuality is menstruation; it is the link among women
scattered throughout a world divided by violent
masculine givernance.... proliferating allusions to
menstruation and menstrual blood ....  Like V.
herself, menstrual blood materializes in veiled,
ambivalent forms, provoking male dread and
fascination.  As an aspect of V., it equivocated her
alignment with either maternity or death; she embraces
each.  Menstruation is both a positive and a negative
power, the blood simultaneously an announcement of
fertility and its negation." (pp. 23-4)

"The blood spilled by twentieth-century hostilitites,
the blood which appears to usher in V., potentially
signifies its opposing terms: renewal, synchrony, even
a refusal to reproduce the systems of violence.  As
Pynchon himself is rumored to insist, the title of the
book is not V but V. [V-period] ...." (p. 24)

   "V. is a threshold figure, bridging sacred and
profane, presence and absence, past and present.  She
displaces either/or oppositions, marking the limits of
order and containing it." (p. 28)

"In V., the Old World father leaves a legacy to his
(metaphorically) New World son, cryptically encoded as
V.  Perhaps the legacy is America, the Virgin Land,
where the promise of cyclical regeneration for a
fallen world lies latent.  Here, the promise and the
warning materialize in V., a figure who embraces
oppositions.  Her womb is both threatening and fertile
-- like America, according to the imagery of the old
sermons." (p. 31)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0203&msg=65844

And from Dana Medoro, The Bleeding of America:   
Menstruation as Symbolic Economy in Pynchon, Faulkner,
and Morrison (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002),
"Introduction," pp. 1-14 ...

"If American literature has inherited from the Puritan
jeremiads a fascination with the American project of
beginning again in the New World, it also has taken
on, without quite being able to admit it, the unspoken
anxiety that accompanies this fantasy of rebirth. 
This 'coming face to face with original sin' ...
involves an ambivalence about facing the mark of that
sin: menstrual blood.... a tropology of menstruation
accompanies the myth of America, its vision of promise
and its sense of doom.  The future of the second
Jerusalem or Eden remains haunted by the 'curse of
Eve'; the cyclical ideal of shedding the past and
starting over conjures up the imagery or language
surrounding menstruation.... reemerges in the novels
of ... Thomas Pynchon, William Faulkner, and Toni
Morrison.  As these authors position their work within
and against the myth of America, they draw upon the
jeremiads' rhetoric and focus it through complex
representations of menstruating females.  Their novels
reveal the extent to which the foundation of American
literature has been bleeding from the start." (p. 7)

   "This study is deconstructionist in approach; it
works from the concept of Eve's curse and deconstructs
the difference between curse and cure...." (p. 8 ff.)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=73217

http://www.greenwood.com/books/BookDetail.asp?dept_id=1&sku=GM2059

--- Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I've been re-reading V. lately ...

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