trangressivity, sex, guns, power

[Joseph Tracy]

just wanted to revisit some earlier thoughts  from the Gold, Man  
Sax...post.  Violins, could you give me a little back up?  Ooh yes,  
love the sound of a shotgun earlie in the morning.

So if the whole alligator gig is a myth( kinda looked at that in the  
Set Vs, Horus post)  what is it based on? What is P talking about as  
mostly tall tale? Well, Mike often comes up with thoughts very  
parrallel to my own and he too suggests military service:

  the unemployable recent Navy vet, who signed up for not just a job
but an adventure,
and after that's over, going "what have I learned? what marketable  
skills?"
Benny, sitting on a stoop, is willing to tell tales (like Gnossos) to
beguile his way into a lady's affections....and it works!

Think of Sasha, Frenezi, the temptation of Prairie, DL and martial  
arts, think of "The girls on the stoop drew breath in concert through  
bared teeth. They watched eagerly; as if each had kicked in on a pool  
for who'd draw first blood." Think of Shasta, the women who fall for  
Slothrop etc..

I don't on a personal level get the connection between sex and  
violence but I think it is powerful and has much to do with the  
phenomena  of conquest,  attraction to power, revenge, and visceral  
rituals of dominance.

One could divide it so there are 3 kinds of sex that appear in Pynchon 
( or I suppose anywhere)  2 explicit  in P and 1 slightly more  
veiled. 1)The first category involves a a great deal of power  
imbalance: the most abhorrent is rape and the least abhorent but  
still some degree of queasy is ouwardly consensual ie( Schoenmaker  
and Esther, Mickey and his tie women, Lake with Sloat and Fresno)   
but this always feels more like theft than an honest transaction, and  
is often a revisiting of childhood sexual abuse(Japonica).   2)  
consensual sex: this may be transgressive in terms of gender, and  
what is done to pleasure the other but P treats it much more lightly  
and it leaves no scars. 3) where sex is mingled with deep affection  
and care:  Here sex is in some way transformative even if it is also  
transgressive as in the 3 way love of Yashmeen Reef and Cyprian.  
Sometimes it is off camera as it were, Mason, Prairie and the russian  
kid or Isaiah. Sometimes it isn't sex at all but deep affection and  
love ( Mason and Dixon)

OK, one more kind of sax playing - imaginary: Slothrop and the ladies  
on the map? Frenezi and the TV Cop, Reef and the poodle.

  Ok, back to V: Fina is ready in the bathtub scene to enter into  
equal consensual sex with no ties other than whatever emotions are  
genuine. Benny can't handle this ( or a similar offer from Paola) .   
He wants unequal sex. He is an adolescent schlemiehl.

"It was a desire he got, off and on, to be cruel and feel at the same  
time sorrow so big it filled him, leaked out his eyes and the holes  
in his shoes to make one big pool of human sorrow on the street"....

Something in the navy or his home or his choices or lack of choices  
has crippled him, fucked him up  big time; he is juvenile, preferring  
pornography  to the real thing.  This is exactly what he gets  again  
and again, unfulfilled fantasies like the pool table scene.

The question this begs for me is whether Pynchon is referring in  
Profane's life to a certain kind of fiction that tittilates the  
protagonist  and leads him/her from one false lead to anotherto  
ultimately lead her/him to a  classic comedic sentimental wedding.   
Particularly what I am thinking about is the reliance on pornographic  
methods that keeps the" suspense" going and  what this says about  
what fiction is and how it tends to move toward  either the  
pornography of conquest( Ayn Rand, Beowulf, An Officer and a  
Gentleman, James Bond, ) or the pornography of false romanticism( the  
sacredness of marriage, the nobility of the American dream, personal  
happiness as evidence of spiritual fulfillment), while leaving larger  
moral and philosophical questions unanswered.  Now obviously there is  
a large swath of writers who challenge these forms and take on these  
larger questions ( Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hemmingway, Melville, Twain,  
This would be a long , long list))but what makes Pynchon interesting  
to me is the way he chases Alice's talking rabbit (telling the truth  
about the unconscious) from history and personal experience into the  
realms of myth  and the parts of history we don't often see.