V-2nd - 4?

[Michael Bailey]

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> This chapter, and there my be reasons such as what I wrote below, has always
> seemed to me to be non-integral within V. I can accept
> all the other chapters and segments easier.
>
>

I think the ruminations in the previous chapter on altering the flesh
in Rachel's conversation with Dr Schoenmaker are essential.

The actual nose job itself has several aspects I would like to consider briefly:

a) actionable actions on Dr S's part - this was before PC but also
before the Sexual Revolution (the Pill came out in about 1960, right?)
- however, Esther's part of a Bohemian subculture and there's a
notional possibility that this is a form of adventure for her rather
than an odious violation...although there are many indications that we
are not expected to be completely jolly about her plight...but
probably equally many indications that this and the other forms of
"swinging" described in the book do exist and maybe, just perhaps,
you, the reader, might be interested in similar haps, and, ahem, if
so, one can't say outright where these kicks may be found in your
town, but here at least are a few clues and some of the plus-minus as
well as some of the things some have thought about some of these
activities... (quite a bit more smoothly, of course...and rather
cautiously: nobody is likely to claim to have been led down the
primrose path to promiscuity by a Pynchon novel (true?))

b) lowbrow reference: Where the Boys Are (1960) with George Hamilton
and Connie Francis and Paula Prentiss and Yvette Mimieux and even that
Frank Gorshin ("dialectic jazz") - wonderful movie...
   - Yvette Mimieux's character was in some kind of trouble and her
distress was very transmissible...also for me, the performance was
quite affecting...
    I think the ladies in V., although Bohemian, are meant to be seen
as courageous in taking sexual risks and consequences, and not
freaking out as YM's character did - but the ethos they play against
would have been pretty real at the time, eh?

c) for P to deal with attempting to display at least some insights
into sexual relations, and the thought processes of women, is an
exception to the "everything patterned after Adams", isn't it?

d) on a different track: there's a bit in GR about how the bombed-out
place was supposed to look like that, all the so-called hostilities
were actually a co-operation to achieve that...
anyway, theories of history ... old Yeats and his "harsh, surgical"
era that we were supposed to be infundibulating into...(...always
figured I might want to sit that one out, me & Jethro Tull...)

Rachel has opened the subject about changing one's gene pool and so
forth, and now in the actual surgery, the recreational sex and the
retroussee-ing of the nose isn't so much being lampooned or
excoriated, but "seen as they are", with enough concrete detail to
picture, enough rhetorical opinion words flung by all participants and
narrator(s) to frame a debate, and enough resonance with the Making
and Unmaking of V. herself, (the nose that originally harmonized with
the face being "sculpted" into a form nature never intended; the V.
whom we met as Victoria Wren (with all that implies) continually
taking on stranger shapes*...) that it seems like it might fit in some
ways with the rest of the book...


* V. and Esther's nose, similar in being changed violently through
acts of conscious will
...although, looking for a point of difference, contrast the
matter-of-fact (in the main) portrayals of Rachel and Esther with the
"mystique" (though The Feminine Mystique wasn't published till 1963)
embodied in V....