ATDTDA (3) Dynamitic mania, 80-86

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

                        Paul Mackin:
                       I suppose it's natural to attribute slightly puzzling 
                       things, even troubling things, about Pynchon's 
                       female characters to Pynchon's attitude toward 
                       that  sex.  "Pynchon view of women" has come 
                       up here fairly frequently over the years and 
                       pretty much always with a negative 
                       connotation attached to  it.

Maybe that's because there's a generally negative aspect
to Pynchon's sex scenes---again the model seems to be
R. Crumb---outsized and monstrous and ever
mindful of all the little kinks that trigger desire----but what
do you know, here comes big, bad Impolex G a-a-a-and
another Gold Star (pull out my little page of metallic stars
here, here's a metalflake vermillion star, here's a light 
cobalt blue star, rendolent of some fading nightclub, here's 
a deep purple star, gleaming with little stars inside the star,
giving off a whiff of frankincense and myhrr and oxidized 
brass), so we can all note, dwelling deep within the absolute 
pinnacle of Postmodernism, "Great Literature's" most 
famous kink. But in addition to the specificity of desire 
(perhaps there's a Spectrometer of lust, with analogous 
spectral lines for such things as an inherited desire for 
mauve tocques or calyipigian fundements, spectral lines 
that resonate and line up with the DNA evidence 
proffered at the inevitable trial). But with Pynchon,
there's even more to it, 'cause ya gotta throw in the 
whole Professot Frink aspect (Pynchon's both
Slothrop and Pointsman, see?) so it's never
enough that ya got leather and lace and copraphage,
but the fucker throws in A.E. Waite's book of black magic
in your path as well---you know we've wandered deep 
into mad scientist territory now, Rotwang having ugly 
scenes with both Maria and her simulacrum. In the
understandably faded scenes of coitus in AtD (the guy's 
what now, 67?), the sex seems to be an illustration of 
some Riemann function his readers haven't quite caught 
up with yet.

If there is controversy concerning Pynchon's depection
of female charecters, it is because his sex scenes are
so profoundly weird.