ATDTDA (18): 493-494 "captivated by eyes"

[David Morris]

Good catch Clement!

I say this Cyprian-Venus connection is not accidental, especially
since Pynchon references Venus in both V & GR.

Both Cyprian and Yashmeen (Venus?) skate across all kinds of sexual
categories, embodying Freud's "polymorphous perversity" in the
positive way embraced by Norman O. Brown in "Life Against Death,"
where he says "Infantile sexuality is the pursuit of pleasure obtained
through the activity of any and all organs of the human body,"  and
later" If infantile sexuality, judged by the standards of normal adult
sexuality, is perverse, by the same token normal adult sexuality,
judged by the standard if infantile sexuality is an unnatural
restriction of the erotic potentialities of the human body."

The Cyprian/Yashmeen 3-way "marriage" with Reef is I think an ideal in
Pynchon's world, a sort of positive sexual anarchy.

David Morris

On 9/26/07, Clément Lévy <clemlevy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Did someone already mentioned that "Cyprian" is also a traditional epithet for Venus (Aphrodite)? Her island is Cyprus, it's where she landed after her creation from the semen of Ouranos that was thrown into the sea (with testicles and all) after he was castrated by his son Kronos.

> One of the first text to mention it must be Hesiod's Theogony, v. 176-206 (and the text gives the goddess another surname, Cytherea, because she went to Cythere before Cyprus).

> And look there at the first lines of an homeric hymn to Aphrodite:
> http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0138%3Ahymn%3D5

> and there for general information on the goddess!
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphrodite
> Could Cyprian be a devotee of Venus?