V-2nd - Chapter 14

[Mark Kohut]

LK asks:  We get caught up in Melanie's story (and, by the way, does anyone 
think the screenwriters of Black Swan might have read this?

I have seen BS and din't think of this and I should have. Discuss. Discuss!

if so, I say it is sea-changed, turned-over.....Natalie Portman dies after her 
sexuality is self-encountered and 
partly because it is...........

But there are the mirrors..the fantasies....

And the return of the repressed as theme....


----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Tue, February 1, 2011 4:14:09 PM
Subject: V-2nd - Chapter 14

This is the second week we're supposed to be focussing on Chapter 14 - V. in 
Love.  I guess Robin bailed on us as host and Mark's been the main 
standard-bearer.  All this snow doesn't help.  Oh Scandinavian p-listers (you 
know who you are!), please advise:  how the hell do we deal with all this  Bad 
White Shit From the North (metaphorically evil in Pynchon's world)?  Is drinking 
oneself into a stupor an essential survival skill?

Some thoughts on Chapter 14:

1. Robin scathingly accused Young Pynchon of referencing The Rite of Spring 
without caring about it.  Is the lurid quasi/pornographic spin of Pynchon's 
stand-in work, Rape of the Chinese Virgins, meant as a dis to TROS?  Or is it 
must upping the ante to give jaded post-war audiences a taste of how 
controversial the original might have been.  The reports of riots at the 
premiere of TROS may be overblown, but there certainly were loud-mouthed 
arguments going on.

http://www.classicalnotes.net/classics/rite.html

Recreation of the original(sans catcalls), parts 1 and 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjX3oAwv_Fs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb8njeKBfqw&feature=related

2.  We get caught up in Melanie's story (and, by the way, does anyone think the 
screenwriters of Black Swan might have read this?) until Pynchon reminds us that 
this is just Stencil's fantasy of what might have happened, based on what an 
unknown woman, who may or may not have been V. told Porcepic (who, in turn, told 
Stencil).  So we're reading Stencil's pornographic fantasy.  Somewhat like that 
sequence in Mason and Dixon (damn, can't find my book!), where we get wrapped up 
in the story of a young woman being abducted by a Chinese white-slaver or 
something, only to be told we're reading from a trashy novel owned by one of the 
narrator's kids (did I get that right?).  So Pynchon can indulge in the smut and 
disclaim it simultaneously.

3.  Robin also accused Pynchon of being homophobic in this chapter.  I have to 
disagree.  Stencil fantasizes V. as a lesbian, but Melanie is a pure narcissist. 
It's not enough to be watched masturbating, she must be watched via mirror.  
Simone De Beauvoir's got a whole chapter on The Narcissist in her book The 
Second Sex.  Something about how looking at herself in the mirror allows a woman 
to objectify herself as she's objectified by men, making her into both subject 
and object simultaneously - perhaps the only source of power for women in those 
days.  And we know that Pynchon sees mirrors as the flip side of what is, as an 
alternate morality.  V. seems to be giving melanie something that public 
adoration cannot.  She's making her fractured self (good/bad, daughter/lover, 
pampered child/incest victim) whole.  This isn't, in general, What Lesbians Do.  
If Robin's around, wish he'd tell us more about the homophobia.  Maybe I've 
missed something.  The spike in the vagina?  Ouch!  Misogynistic, but not 
homophobic.

Laura