Totalizing Postmodernism
Robin Landseadel
robinlandseadel at comcast.net
Mon Dec 1 11:04:56 CST 2008
Pynchon's most obvious critiques of master-narratives come in the
form of Sister Rochelle's anecdotes. . .
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"Back then, long ago, there were no men at all. Paradise was
female. Eve and her sister, Lilith, were alone in the Garden. A
character named Adam was put into the story later, to help men look
more legitimate, but in fact the first man was not Adam — it was the
Serpent . . .
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"It was sleazy, slippery man," Rochelle continued, "who invented
'good' and 'evil,' where before women had been content to just be.
In among the other confidence games they were running on women
at the time, men also convinced us that we were the natural
administrators of this thing 'morality' they'd just invented. They
dragged us all down into this wreck they'd made of the Creation,
all subdivided and labeled...." (166).
On Dec 1, 2008, at 7:41 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:
> Totalizing Postmodernism: Master-narratives in Pynchon's Vineland
> By Bruce A. Sullivan
>
> http://www.themodernword.com/Pynchon/papers_sullivan.html
I wandered over to find Mary Daly's "Beyond God the Father", the overall
flavor of Sister Rochelle's myths suggest that the good Sister has read
Mary Daly---at least her early stuff. On page xvi of "Beyond God the
Father"
there's this little passage that reinforces Pynchon's demonstration of
Television as a negative force of social control, a central theme of
Vineland
and very close to "Gravity's Rainbow"'s big theme of movies and those
illusions we all bought into, thanks to the movies:
As foretold in this book, television has become a major
instrument
of this ritual reinforcement of self-destructive
mechanisms, so that
. . .the majority, drugged by the perpetual presence of
the politics
of rape on the TV screen, sees it all but sees nothing. The
horrors
of a phallocentric world have simultaneously become more
visible
and more invisible.
I'm not saying that OBA agrees with everything Ms. Daly wrote but I'll
bet
he's read feminist authors prior to writing Vineland. There's a
decided tinge
of eco-feminism and animism in TRP's particular brand of magical
realism.
TRP whilst living up in Aptos probably was plugged into the local
leftist scene.
At that time a lot of the Left's focus and energy was on the ongoing
clearcutting of the vast forests within the green triangle.
Anybody who's read "A Journey into the Mind of Watts"
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_watts.html
and checked out both John Ross' "Murdered by Capitalism" & OBA's
"Against the Day,"*---know that OBA knows his way around leftists.
And the leftist scene in, around, up and down California's "Green
Triangle" was the first big cluster of "Green" types who were working
with the Wicca of eco-feminism. That's where your tree-huggers come
from.
FWIW, one of my [really too many] bumper stickers sez "Tree
Hugging Dirt Worshiper." Wanna bet that TRP is a tree-hugger?
Now look at your cover of "Vineland."
*and actually spent any actual time with them pesky radical leftist
types, like my mom.
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