V-2nd - Chapter 14

[Richard Ryan]

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 4:14 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> 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.

***I agree that Pynchon is not homophobic.  Pynchon is an aesthete and
a voyeur - the affair between V. and Melanie offers him a chance to
climb in their heads (and the heads of the other characters
surrounding them) and watch, giggling and guffawing, as they work
through the variations.

Since Pynchon reminds us continually that Melanie is spiritually dead
and reduced to the level of a fetish, there is no way for the reader
to connect with her (unless we also want to fetishize her, which
perhaps the author encourages us to do).  She herself is so free of
self-sympathy that the text can plausibly suggest her final Grand
Guignol-style vaginal impalement is suicide.  Of course, if you were a
teenage girl in a Thomas Pynchon novel, you'd probably want to kill
yourself too...


>
> Laura
>
>



-- 
Richard Ryan
New York and the World
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty
of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises.
    -- Hannah Arendt