Transgressive sexual depictions in literature

[Ian Livingston]

And what about that there Louis Ferdinand Celine and all his subjects
of the mysterious powerful? And Gide, Artaud, and the other French
underground types? While P. inclines to be more graphic, thus calling
down the ire of Puritania, he hardly seems to be introducing anything,
for gosh sakes. I can't qualify it, but I am inclined to believe P had
encountered all of the above by the time he got round to finishing GR.

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 9:15 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> For ye old discussion:
> I would suggest that, after his early apologetic bits of male
> evilconsciousness, to coin a word, and despite the cowardly Pulitzer
> Committee
> calling Gravity's Rainbow 'obscene', his sexual depictions through Gravity's
> Rainbow are more a critique of 'avant-garde transgressions' than
> in the wake of.......
>
> yes, rape as part of the power against the weaker in V......and in
> GR?-----well, needs lotsa space and others to jump in..
>
> It seems sure that he knew Ulysses and well....Sade was in print in English
> and popular in the sixties..(I bet TRP hates him and his work)
> I bet he did know Death in Venice---probable Magic Mountain allusions in
> Against the Day.....and Nausea, maybe, once again
> very popular (and some think he satirizes existentialism in V....)
>
> ________________________________
> From: Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es>
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Sent: Wed, September 8, 2010 10:21:19 AM
> Subject: Transgressive sexual depictions in literature
>
> This is a (loose ) response to the thread about gang-rape etc. in V. Several
> people have mentioned Lolita and the Nabakov connection but i would suggest
> that we have to include some other factors in our consideration. First,
> Nabakov was hardly the first to use such a transgressive element as
> pedophilia in his work. We could go back to Shelley's The Cenci to find
> something as shocking as incest. Of course from about the same time the M.
> de Sade stands out (although his work was only later rescued from oblivion)
> and alongside him we could note Comte de Lautreamont. Now i dont think TP
> had these in mind. Most likely he also didnt have in mind Mann's Death in
> Venice (infatuation with a young boy) or Sartre's Nausea (again pedophilia).
> Perhaps he was aware of Joyce's "dirty book" Ulysses or the even more
> radical Finnegins Wake (incest, etc). But we can say with certainty that he
> did have the Beats in mind (see SL intro) and most likely would have been
> aware of the censorship and ensuing trials concerning Burroughs Naked Lunch
> or Ginsbergs Howl, perhaps even Henry Miller's own transgressive writing and
> censorship trials (Grove Press Inc. vs. Gerstein, 1961). We see a bit of a
> trend. Sexually transgressive writing becomes a part of avant-garde writing;
> and let us not forget that press (even, or especially, when it brands
> something naughty or notoriuos) sells books (see Joyce and censorship). This
> is not meant as justification for what TP wrote or how, simply an attempt to
> widen the frame of our analysis.
>     That said, i think we can certainly see some maturing and tempering of
> this transgressive writing as his fiction moves from the gang-rape and
> killing of the Herrero girl to GR's catamite Gottfried and much later to
> Cyprian.
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."