COL49 - Chap 1: Roseman

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

Interesting information about the times TCoL49 was written/published.

My tentative answer to the question "Is OBA falling into easy sexism?"
is no. At least not because of the absence of other non-subservient
woman characters. Oedipa's certain loneliness may even turn crucial to
the way the novel is able to keep emancipatory possibilities "bouncing".
Possibilities that enable the novel to exceed the conditions of its
time and place.


Heikki

On Thu, 7 May 2009, Tore Rye Andersen wrote:

>
> Laura:
>
> > By the way, it's interesting that there are few (not one? - correct me, someone) named female characters
> > outside of Oedipa (and Remedios Varo)in the book. She journeys from man to man looking for answers. Is there
> > a reason for this, other than Pynchon falling into the easy sexism of the pre-feminist '60s?
>
> In addition to Grace Bortz, we shouldn't forget the infinitely complex Helga Blamm!
>
> But it's an interesting question. On the one hand, I think Lot 49 could in many ways be
> considered a feminist novel, or at least a proto-feminist novel, but on the other hand it WAS written
> in the largely pre-feminist '60s, as Laura points out. A good comparison here would be Joseph Conrad's
> "Heart of Darkness" - a stark critique of racism and imperialism, but still inevitably tinged by the period
> in which it was written and by the paradigm it was trying to escape. Still, first steps can only go so far,
> and Chinua Achebe is way off the mark, IMHO, when he calls Conrad a "bloody racist."
>
> In much the same way, Pynchon's feminist novel does carry traces of the easy sexism of the period,
> and I think Pynchon would be the first to admit that. In the introduction to "Slow Learner" he says of
> "Low-lands" and the character Dennis Flange:
>
> "[M]aybe I was picking up on male attitudes that were then in the air - more documentably, inside the
> pages of men's magazines, Playboy in particular. I don't think this wagazine was the projection,
> exclusively, of its publisher's private values: if American men had not widely shared such values,
> Playboy would have quickly failed and faded from the scene."
>
> - and of Pig Bodine he says:
>
> "Modern readers will be, at least, put off by an unacceptable level of racist, sexist and proto-Fascist
> talk throughout this story. I wish I could say that this is only Pig Bodine's voice, but, sad to say, it
> was also my own at the time. The best I can say for now is that, for its time, it is probably authentic enough."
>
> When Lot 49 was written, society (and Pynchon) had moved several steps away from the sexism captured so
> wonderfully in the tv series "Mad Men", but it was still a transition period, and I believe a novel like
> Lot 49 helped bring about this transition, even though it still had a foot in the early sixties. Tellingly,
> the two excerpts of the novel that appeared before its publication were printed in men's magazines: Esquire
> and Cavalier (the latter could even be termed a 'girlie magazine'). To me, that sums up this transition
> period perfectly: an excerpt from a proto-feminist novel published in the girlie magazine Cavalier, side by side
> with images of a nude Miss World (a Miss Langley from Wales), and with a 'reportage' (complete with photos,
> of course) of the struggling East Village artist Sharon Kent, who "supports herself by nude modeling" (guess what
> those photos show!).
>
> A-and at the same time, one of the most unsympathetic characters in Lot 49, Winthrop
> Tremaine (the racist seller of surplus swastikas) puts his ads in girlie magazines:
>
> "Got this little factory down outside of San Diego," he told her, "got a dozen of your niggers, say, they can
> sure turn them old armbands out. You'd be amazed how that little number's selling. I took some space in a couple
> of the girlie magazines, and I had to hire two extra niggers last week just to take care of the mail."
>
>
>
>
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