V-2nd - Chapter 14

[Mark Kohut]

Laura maintains (and it's funny if read in a Pynchonian skewed mindscape, I 
say): 

"I don't think BS is in any way a reworking of anything in this chapter, but the 
protagonist does seem to have the passive, tortured artist, abused child with 
lesbian tendencies in common with Melanie."

And there's Love...sex....dying unknowingly ( until too late)...somewhere in 
Grant's Companion someone finds
sourcing in ye old fave Rilke.......

I do not think anything from this chapter of V. is reworked in that movie...but 
riff on the thematic connections someone...anyone, anyone?


 


----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Wed, February 2, 2011 11:54:50 AM
Subject: Re: V-2nd - Chapter 14

I don't think BS is in any way a reworking of anything in this chapter, but the 
protagonist does seem to have the passive, tortured artist, abused child with 
lesbian tendencies in common with Melanie.

Also thinking of the 1913 setting: war, as portrayed in The Rape of the Chinese 
Virgins, is disturbing, but theoretical.  Then it becomes suddenly, gruesomely 
real.  So Pynchon's recreating not just the mentality surrounding the premiere 
of The Rite of Spring, but the mentality in 1913 towards the impending war:  
Titillating to the generals, the politicians, the aristocracy or anyone with an 
ax to grind, but unrealistically imagined.

Laura


-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>Sent: Feb 1, 2011 5:15 PM
>To: kelber at mindspring.com
>Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: V-2nd - Chapter 14
>
>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
>
>
>
>