Bianca

[Monte Davis]

Anville A:
 
> While we're at it, why not raise the point of mechanophilia, 
> "auto"-erotica in the truest sense of the Word, from the GI 
> boys singing about 1001 ways to make love to the A4, to the 
> delectable feel of Imipolex G, and then on to Rachel Owlglass 
> and her MG reincarnated as a male counterculture figure in 
> Vineland. . . .

Yes, very much apopos. Maybe overreaching here, but I assimilate that to my
argument that the central tension is between idealized yearned-for eros --
spontaneous, natural, equal, transcendently free, "organic"  -- and all of
real, lived eros' ways of turning out to be instrumental, programmed,
dominant/submissive, mechanical... and otherwise in the service of
everything you dreamed would be excluded from the purity of Looooooooove.

When the war is over and Roger & Jessica's cocoon (Anderson shelter?) breaks
open:

"Ta-ta mad Roger, it’s been grand, a wartime fling, when we came it was
utterly incendiary, your arms open wide as a Fortress’s wings, we had our
military secrets, we fooled the fat old colonels right and left but
stand-down time must come to all, yikes! I must run sweet Roger really it’s
been dreamy . . .  Her future is with the World’s own, and Roger’s only with
this strange version of the War he still carries with him." (628-629)
 
P. invites us to mourn and moon with Roger, and *at the same time and in the
same words* rubs our noses in the grown-up knowledge that Jessica is makiong
the right choice, that Beaver will be a better husband, day-to-day partner,
father than Roger could ever be. "The orders come from higher than she can
reach." Darwin, domesticity, everything lasting, favors that decision. It's
life, it's sanity and common sense. And it's chilling. 

Similarly, Esther's homing mechanism kicking in at Fergus Mixolydian's (p.
58 in the Harper Perennial pb) when a nice young fellow approaches her:

"She knew instinctively: he will be fine as the fraternity boy just out of
an Ivy League school who knows he will never stop being a fraternity boy as
long as he lives. But who still feels he is missing
something, and so hangs at the edges of the Whole Sick Crew. If he is going
into management, he writes. If he is an engineer or architect why he paints
or sculpts. He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he
is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there
should ever have been a line, or even if there is a line at all. He will
learn how to be a twinned man and will go on at the game, straddling until
he splits up the crotch and in half from the prolonged tension, and then he
will be destroyed. She assumed ballet fourth position, moved her breasts at
a 45° angle to his line-of-sight, pointed her nose at his heart, looked up
at him through her eyelashes.
   'How long have you been in New York?' ”

Hey, fellow hetero guys, let's be Brad: two lines earler, we walked up to
this babe at a party, and our Harris tweed suit is primo, and her body
language is favorable, and we're humming "This could be the start of
something big." But P. gives us a glimpse of another angle of vision, rather
like Jessica's. He shows us just a little of the gears and calculations --
rather like Jessica's -- at work in any ordinary, not especially cute meet.
And that poor preterite loser that Esther sees --- it ain't me, babe,
nossirree. Again, chilling.

What I'm saying (back to you, Carvill) is that the horrific intensiity of
Slothrop+Bianca and Pokler+"Ilse" (let's just leave the Brigadier out of
this, ok?) is not an isolated fixation, but very much part of a pattern.

The pattern is "There's more (and less) to this than Loooooooove. The
moments that should be most purely I and Thou are also the moments when
you're most at the mercy of everything else in the Creation."

And it reaches all the way through Jessica and Esther to the utter
detachment of Oedipa's game of Strip Botticelli: "...it took him 20 minutes,
rolling, arranging her this way and that, as if she thought, he were some
scaled-up, short-haired, power-faced little girl with a Barbie dolll. She
may have fallen asleep once or twice....  Her climax and Metzger’s, when it
came, coincided with every light in the place, including the TV tube,
suddenly going out, dead, black. It was a curious experience."

Ain't it though?