BDSL,1- Genetic Therapy for Inherent Vice

[bandwraith at aol.com]

Gnossos returns to "campus" is like a breath of fresh
air with the promise of ridding the place of all the
"false suitors" of modernism that have been lounging
around decadently usurping the charms of
"campus-life". His antics at the frat house dinner
are hysterical- lifted (in tribute?) by Pynchon for
Mexico's boardroom stunts late in GR.

But right after that Gnossos rapes Pamela.

She may be the heiress of BP.  She may be wearing
a bathrobe and high heels. She may even secretly
want Gnossos, but she does not want to be
raped. She repeatedly asks him to stop, and he
repeatedly ignores her. Farina does a fair job of
communicating her distress, and it is, today,
painful to read.

Gnossos's inherent vice is not one of knowledge
or knowing- he is Gnossos, after all- it is not
epistemologic. His sin has more to do with his
balls than his brains. It has to do with his being.




-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, Aug 18, 2010 12:13 am
Subject: Re: BDSL,1- Genetic Therapy for Inherent Vice


not that it isn't foggy.  my impressions of BDSL are foggy because I
haven't read it in a long while.
Foggy is also the impression we're left with at the end of IV.

But the shape of what I mean, somewhere in the fog, is that although
Gnossos in BDSL is pre-feminist -
heck, he's even pre-Vatican-II so at that point all non-Catholics were
going to Hell -

and therefore neither the character nor the book has, oh, what would it 
be
called, something like "conspicuous irony concerning the "dominant 
male" role",
or "certain redeeming touches that have become necessary in portraying 
a hero"

but there's enough sensitivity in the book to make reading it something 
like
reading V. - "cast my mem'ry back then/sometimes I'm overcome thinkin'
about it"
(as Van Morrison wrote in "Brown-eyed Girl")

and to know that this talent would've incorporated cultural seismic
changes in later books that
we do not have due to the accident of the author's mortality: and
that's the thing
that can't be cured and must be endured, and we all are aware of
various attempts
at cures for that - channeling, seances, belief in the Resurrection...
literarily, perhaps, simply reading, rereading, recommending, 
speculating on
influences ripping through it and out into, well, V. for one...IV for
another (that would be an interesting comparison...)



On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 6:27 AM,  <bandwraith at aol.com> wrote:
> I think it's still pretty foggy. How does "the text" take "that"
> into account, in either book? Needs some explaining. The
> desire to cure, and the evolving means to to effect a cure, are
> also inherited. A- and who's doing the enduring? And when
> the latest "cure" becomes available, who gets access?
>
>
> 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

> -----------
> but isn't it pretty clear the text takes that into account in both 
books?
>
> "what can't be cured, sure, must be endured, sure" (Joyce, in 
Portrait,
> right?)
>
> also that Sailing to Byzantium has something about that too, doesn't
> it? (not the famous part, the ragged cloak and so forth, but one of
> the lines nobody remembers...)
>
> On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 5:55 AM,  <bandwraith at aol.com> wrote:
>>
>> I think we've been sold a bag of shit regarding Original Sin.
>> Unfortunately, alpha male Gnossos, eventually to under-
>> go beta decay, is as much a part of the problem as he is
>> a cure. I've returned both IV and BDSL to the library- I no
>> longer buy books if I can avoid it- so this idea, as
>> developed in a comparison of the two, may take a little
>> while. More, whenever.
>