Bianca

[Anville Azote]

For the past several months, every time I've wanted to look up a line
in one of my books, the book in question has been packed in some box
or airtight plastic bin.  This is what I get for yo-yoing up and down
the gorram East Coast (apocheir in north Alabama, pericheir in Boston
-- any Bostonian p-listers want to hit the Barnes and
Borders-a-Million come the twenty-first?).  Quotations will, by
necessity, be from memory.

On 11/9/06, Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> I should say that I find considerable stretches of V. -- especially the
> yo-yoing and bopping around in NYC -- slack, arbitrary, and short on the
> "progressive *knotting into*" of the next four novels. Amazing for a
> ~25-year-old, and of course I'd give an arm to have written any of its best
> parts -- it's just not up to the standard he *would* set. I was too young
> for hipster or beat culture, Kerouac etc, and a lot of the hanging out in V.
> just leaves me waiting for something more than happenstance to happen. (I
> react the same way to much of The Last Detail, for what that's worth.)
>

Friend of mine first read V. in a park beside a river, one summer
afternoon with the sun slanting humidly through the tree leaves,
tripping hard on blotter acid bought They said from the Russian mafia.
 She showed up at my door with the evening turning blue and the
sunshine going strong and read to me the sequence with Benny Profane
hunting a gator through Fairing's Parish.  It probably colored my
perception of the book, if not of Pynchon in general.

The line which comes back to me most forcefully when I think of the
Lucille pool-table scene is Lucille's reply to Benny, "They've all
been said."  It harks back to the whole decadent bath in which the
Whole Sick Crew steeps, saying nothing new and only rearranging the
parts handed to them, exhausting all the combinations like Nietzsche
described by Borges, on their way to maximal entropy.  Oh yeah, it
will haunt me.  (And what a stroke on TRP's part, to include the Ayn
Rand satire Mafia Winsome in the same Sick Crew as the
deconstructivist Greasy-Spooners.  Pig Bodine asking what we think of
Sartre's thesis that we are all impersonating an identity foreshadows
Alan Sokal. . . .)

All this talk of sex scenes in Pynchon makes me wonder:  what is the
significance of the audience in these scenes?

Slothrop and Bianca are alone together in this episode which disturbs
some p-listers so much, but Bianca is performing for the Anubis crowd
a little while earlier.  How many marks on Slothrop's map happen
behind closed doors?  The brigadier and his lady are alone (although
the lady in question files reports afterward).    Mlle Jarretiere is
usually alone, dreaming or with V., except during the "Enlevement"
premiere in which she dies.  Rachel Owlglass believes herself to be
alone with her MG and doesn't know that Benny is watching.  Ditto for
Esther, Schoenmaker and Irving watching from the next room.  When
Metzger finally unwraps Oedipa, the Paranoids have receded into the
background, and they don't really return until everyone shares their
simultaneous climax.

How many times in Pynchon's world does one character stage a sexual
display intended for the others of that world?  There's L'Enlevement
des Vierges, in V; Alpdruecken and "On the Good Ship Lollipop" in GR;
hell, even the Marquis de Sod commercial in Vineland and the Ghastly
Fop books in M&D.

"In a play, even the audience is part of the performance."
-- Daisuke Aramaki, in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

"Step 5 -- Derive another reading of the text, one in which it is
interpreted as referring to itself. In particular, find a way to read
it as a statement which contradicts or undermines either the original
reading or the ordering of the hierarchical opposition (which amounts
to the same thing)."
-- Chip Morningstar, "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything"

On a fairly frequent basis, we find in Pynchon's books examples of
characters doing to each other what Pynchon does for us:  stage
displays of flesh and fetish.  Is a little voice whispering to us to
pay attention to what we readers are doing, constructing these
depraved acts inside our heads, getting hard or wet off them?

Looking over this e-mail, it's pretty damn obvious I'm in love with
the sound of my own words.

-A. A.