Kick-Ass Thank You

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Thanks, Jasper, for the great hosting.  Hope you'll take on another stint down the line.

Some thoughts on Lake: [WARNING: ATD and GR SPOILERS}

Lake coming across as a flat, inhuman character may be very much TRP's intention.  The menage-a-trois might have more to do with math than sexuality.

In the Deuce-Lake-Sloat threesome, Lake is the middle term, passive, acted upon.  The most control she has over the situation is "she had to be careful never to make anything seem like a demand" [p. 268].  But in general, "they" keep her tied up, "they" take her to Four Conrners, put her on her knees "with the point of insertion exactly above the mythical crosshairs," the zero-point.

Compare Lake with Gottfried in GR {p. 94, Penguin]:

"'The Rome-Berlin Axis' he called it the night the Italian came and they were all on the round bed, Captain Blicero plugged into Gottfried's upended asshole and the Italian at the same time into his pretty mouth."

While both Lake and Gottfried are passive intermediaries, they both seem to enjoy it.  Lake tries to appear passive as she actively solicits these encounters.  Gottfried has no ability to escape the situation, but he seems generally good-natured about it, unaware, like Katje, that the oven looms, naively making plans for after the war ends.  Gottfried becomes part of a different mathematical equation at the end.  Blicero refuses until the very end to divulge the exact weight of the payload of the 00000 rocket.  In all these situations, Lake and Gottfried are de-humanized, reduced to elements of an equation, points on a graph.

Compare this with the Yashmeen-Cyprian-Reef threesome.  Cyprian is the intermediary, but rather than being dehumanized, he seems to have almost a solemn, religious function, the repository of Reef's sperm, or life-force, delivering it to the altar (Yashmeen) on his knees (? - can't find the page).  This seems to be the first step of Cyprian's spiritual journey.  If there is some sort of mathematical equation implied, I don't have the mathematical background to see it.  But the first threesomes described here are sordid, and carried out on Cartesian coordinates.  The last one seems to tie in with Yashmeen's view of finding enlightenment through math.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com>

>Jasper:
>
>>I am curious why there were only a couple of comments on the last two 
>>questions about character motivations and psychology (Why Lake + Deuce, and 
>>why Lake thinks she's "bad").  I figured those would do a lot better than 
>>the more abstract questions about mirroring and dreams and "Them".
>
>Thanks for some ass-kicking hosting, Jasper. My fundament is all sore....
>
>My own lack of reply to those last two questions has to do with the fact 
>that I find Lake (and the Lake-related incidents) in AtD by far the LEAST 
>interesting aspect of the novel. Mark's post about Pynchon's 
>characterization (or lack of same) is spot on, at least with regard to Lake, 
>who seems but a shallow variation of that great, full-bodied character from 
>Vineland, Frenesi. I generally don't think Pynchon does bad characters - 
>Frenesi, Slothrop, Mason and Dixon are IMHO as complex and interesting as 
>any introspective character out of Roth or Bellow - but Lake indeed IS "bad" 
>- not only a bad girl, but a bad character. Pynchon seems strangely 
>uninterested in giving her a life of her own (as opposed to a lot of the 
>other characters in AtD, such as Cyprian, Dally, or Stray, for instance.) 
>I've been through AtD twice now, and both times I grew a bit impatient 
>during the Lake sections, to be honest.
>
>In short: my lack of reply in this particular instance had absolutely 
>nothing to do with the quality of your questions, and everything to do with 
>my lack of interest in Pynchon's shallow Lake (and boy, these are HARSH 
>words from me - Like Robin pointed out a couple-three weeks ago, I tend to 
>think Pynchon is made of Unobtainium, and I love AtD with a passion...)
>
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