Apropos of some of our gender talk here: Marilyn French reads Pynchon(!?) ..not really

[alice wellintown]

Young Pynchon is an anxious thief; the buddy line, in Moby-Dick terms,
"the Monkey Rope", that binds like an &,  Dixon to Mason and both to
the rails, or to the mast, if the river boat of Confidence Man delight
thee more, is a cogged circle that fits and fixes all wheels, turns,
turns, turns toward Wiggleworth's Day of Doom. The Puritan Pynchon, is
a dark romantic; his ancestry full of heretics; he is an Ahab, a
Pyncheon, and like Milton's Satan who, when he sees the Sun, curses it
and Heaven Lost, when arrived in Paradise, or any of Shakespeare's
tragic villian-heros, but the seasons they go round and round as
Emerson's circles.
Circles
from Essays: First Series (1841)
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here.

ESSAY X _Circles_



Sunset


The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out.

I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I
sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them;
but first I pass.

Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet's rim, the warm waves blush like wine.
The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun- slow dived from noon-
goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is,
then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy.
Yet is it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far
flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly
confounds. 'Tis iron- that I know- not gold. 'Tis split, too- that I
feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the
solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in
the most brain-battering fight!

Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred
me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not
me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er enjoy. Gifted
with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most
subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good
night-good night! (waving his hand, he moves from the window.)

'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the
least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels,
and they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder,
they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire
others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I've dared, I've
willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad- Starbuck
does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness
that's only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should
be dismembered; and- Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will
dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller
one. That's more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot
at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded
Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies- Take some one
of your own size; don't pommel me! No, ye've knocked me down, and I am
up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your
cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab's compliments
to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve
me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path
to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is
grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of
mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an
obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!


On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 9:00 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Marilyn French was a novelist and second-wave feminist theorist
> of 70s and beyond. She wrote "The Women's Room" and
>
> "Shakespeare's Division of Experience" from which I get this stuff:
>
> "Works concerned with the masculine principle..are linear and transcendent..
> that is, the narrative progresses chronologically and the protagonist has a
> specific worldly goal"....
>
> "Literature concerned with the feminine principle is circular and eternal: it
> juggles time
> or ignores it. It presents incidents which have no apparent causal (rational)
> connections.
> ["You're going to want cause and effect..."--GR...]  Cause and effect and
> chronology may
> be entirely suspended in favor of psychological, emotional, associational links.
> "
> Feminine works are not mainly concerned with progress towards a goal, but with
> depiction of
> the texture of life, its quality. They focus on interior experience....and are
> synthetic rather than
> analytic in their thinking. ......
>
> "There is [often] no cosmic order...even power-in-the-world is largely
> nullified. Power may be
> evaded, mocked, parodied or converted...
>
> In addition, "feminine" worlds [in Literature] are essentially anarchic."
>
> Discuss among yourselves in realtion to Pynchon's works...
>
>
>
>