On Pynchon, McEwan possible influence thread if interested and you might not be...understandably

[Mark Kohut]

"Cocker at the Theatre" is another story of McEwan's from the early 70s. It spoofs and uses beyond spoof,  via a local theater group, the 
public display of nudity on stage---"O Calcutta", etc.--and all the world's a stage, of course. It is the shortest story, funny and I suggest
you might chuckle over it and I won't spoil it, It is in "First Love, Last Rites".

But in it is this: [the choreographer]: "i want the girls squatting in a V shape, five on each side.She stood where the apex was to be, moving her arms.
They sat at her feet and she clipped up and down the middle leaving a trail of musk. She made the V deeper, then shallow again, she made it a horseshoe and a crescent and then a shallow V once more. "Very nice, Dale", said Jasmin [director].....She fitted the legs together of each couple, she straightned 
their backs, she put their heads in position and made the partners touch forearms. .....There were ten couples in the V shape on the carpet.....

It's about sex. Bet he had read V. ?  



----- Original Message ----
From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, April 4, 2010 4:42:31 PM
Subject: On Pynchon, McEwan possible influence thread if interested and you might not be...understandably

McEwan's first writings, long stories, began to appear in 1972 ff....in straightforward realist prose, he wrote suggestive irreal psychological horror stories---Barthelme-like but for willed deadpan humorlessness, maybe; story scenes, often sex-themed which might fit into GR---again but for humor via humorlessness (if that makes sense).  Unlike his recent fiction, these are in the suggestive, associative, symbolic, allegorical mode---like so much of TRPs
work. 

Bio says that he got--or studied--psychoanalytic 'analysis' and found fictional correlatives in his early work. 

Anyway,  In "Homemade" ,1972,  in a riff on a wild woman that the young characters hear of, she is said to have done it with a car gearshift..as well
as other Pynchonian gross-out fetish couplings. 

In "Plane Geometry", surely another Alice-in-Wonderland-influenced tale, if not TRP-influenced,  the narrator learns in reading the diaries of his amateur mathematician grandfather, of a friend of his who 'revolutionized' the nature of mathematics in the late 1800s--before he disappeared. He discovered how to make a 'plane with no surface'--reads like a magician doing origami with scissors--who figured out how cuts and folds could make a plain plane of paper disappear. Has consequences. See clue herein and  further use in the story---which also contains a penis in formaldehyde in a jar. Which breaks.