V-2nd - 4?

[kelber at mindspring.com]

I agree with Mark et al that this chapter doesn't fit in so well with the rest.  It could pretty much stand alone as a New Yorker story.  Pynchon scores some Holocaust references here, which pre-shadow the later Herero Genocide sequence, and adds some ruminations on the human vs. inanimate theme.  In terms of novelist's housekeeping, he takes care of chores such as fleshing out Schoenmaker, introducing Godolphin, and explaining Stencil's connection to the Whole Sick Crew.  But I think the main point of the chapter is to pen some snarky, edgy, attention-getting sexuality.  He's a first-time novelist trying to get published, after all.  

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
>Sent: Jul 31, 2010 3:49 AM
>To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: V-2nd - 4?
>
>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....