Pynchon's misdirection

[Glenn Scheper]

The thought that Pynchon has created a "family book"
is exciting, given that I find in his works my taboo
auto-erotic knowledge. I just found a gem on the web,
another clearly auto-erotic, who I remember now that
I had looked at before. This web page is titillating
just to hear the several reviewers mention a few of
the words and phrases used, in Sylvia Plath's Ariel.
Yet as closely as some linger on the sexuality of it,
I wonder if any of her reviewers has any inkling, or
could even imagine past their bounds of the ordinary,
to autocunnilingus as its referent ground. Inability
to see male and female at once reminds me of Gospel
of Thomas (I think), about when you make the inside,
outside, and the male, female. Random excerpts...

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/ariel.htm

 We see,
 hear,
 touch,
 and taste the process of disintegration:
 the horse emerging from the darkness of the
 morning,
 the sun beginning to rise as Ariel rushes
 uncontrollably across the countryside,
 the rider trying to catch the brown neck but
 instead "tasting"
 the blackberries on the side of the road.


 On a literal level,
 few readers would willingly accept this ride into
 nothingness.


 But the speaker,
 identifying with the arrow,
 presents herself as no sacrificial victim on the
 altar of any god.

 Far from a desire to transcend the physical,
 "Ariel"
 expresses the exultation of a sex act in which
 the speaker is both the driving arrow and the
 receiving cauldron.

 Rosenthal points to the basic conflict of the
 poem in observing that "In a single leap of
 feeling,
 it identifies sexual elation (in the full sense
 of the richest kind of encompassment of life)
 with its opposite,
 death's nothingness"


 The speaker moves with some potent force -
 a horse,
 a sexual partner,
 some aspect of herself -


 Her moment of triumph,
 moreover,
 is conveyed in verbs which may suggest -
 if sexuality is at all to be considered
 appropriate here -
 female rather than male sexuality.

 To foam and to glitter have arguably much more
 resonance when considered in terms of female
 orgasm than in terms of male orgasm.

 While the speaker of the poem may call herself
 the arrow,
 while she might arrogantly lay claim to that
 title,
 she is still female,
 still the wheat and the water,
 still naked and exposed and vulnerable.

 It is important to note that once the speaker
 begins her flight,
 she is no longer the arrow;
 her femaleness has ineluctably reasserted itself.

 In Western culture the unclothed female,
 whether it be the self-disclosing creator or the
 emblematic and naked female subject,
 can be a symbol only of vulnerability and
 victimization,
 even when the audience to the glorious and
 hopeful unveiling is the self.

 The tragedy of Plath's work,
 however,
 is that she has conceived of this overwhelmingly
 omnipotent figure in the only metaphors available
 to her -
 those of the masculine poetic tradition.

 The most telling irony of the poem is that the
 masculine God of patriarchal discourse has been
 displaced here by the "I"
 which is the speaker herself.

 And the female speaker has become the phallic
 arrow which impels itself toward that sun.

 But such a journey into knowledge will prove
 deadly -
 because the language,
 the signifiers of that journey dictate that it
 must be so for the speaking subject who is still
 "dew,"
 still female.

 Even when the father is replaced,
 his words speak for him,
 his language secures his position:
 the dew will be dispersed by the sun.

 These images suggest an identification with a
 subjugated animal/racial/sexual otherness (the
 'nigger eye'/I)

 The second movement,
 which almost imperceptibly takes over from the
 first,
 is phallic,
 solar,
 and vertical.

 The Apollonian 'red Eye',
 destination of the poem's journey,
 is an emblem of specularity and surveillance,
 while the 'cauldron'
 of morning/mourning invokes an extreme religious
 imagery of martyrdom and purification;
 in Isaiah 29:1,
 Jerusalem is referred to as Ariel,
 the city destined to be destroyed by fire.

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
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