AtD Sins of the Father: Lake, unintegrated

[Mark Kohut]

In some Freudian, or much more probably, Jungian way,  Lake
is presented as having an unintegrated self......
 
That virgin bride compartmentalization riff.....sex and love not even close to being unified
coupled with the feelings for my dad and Deuce 'are not related' line...
 
Once is a character aside; twice is thematic in TRP, I want to argue......

From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>; P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Friday, February 24, 2012 10:53 AM
Subject: Re: AtD Sins of the Father


Re Lake: Do we always marry the anti-Father when we hate him for his rejection of us?
Lake sez: her feelings for her dad and her feelings for Deuce are 'two separate things" when
one guy states the obvious. 
 
Such compartmentalization or almost no self-awareness? She just acts...in rebellion, in reaction,
we get almost no reflection from her ala her brothers..(so far; forgetting the upcoming)......She inherits rebellion and acts it out?
 
I'd say she is an unreliable psychologist of herself.....as Paul M. observes, she is psychologically passive in major ways
despite her rebellious actions, especially in the way she becomes part of the threesome....
if she had been in love, no feelings of betrayal? no feelings of humiliation? 
 
Deuce Kindred......Murdering kindred to her dad.....the Two are kindred? Lowest cards in the deck?
 
 
 

From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Friday, February 24, 2012 9:29 AM
Subject: Re: AtD Sins of the Father


 Mark Kohut explored and explicated:

Sins of the Fathers, Freddy Crews' [akin to Freddie Kreuger] book subtitled Hawthorne's Psychological 
>Themes was his Freudian exploration of that Pynchon fave

so he's on the board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation...
I think some of my fave conspiracy theorists regard that body as similar to holocaust deniers (whether justifiably or not, I'm in no position to say)--- although he's taken what I consider the side of the angels in creationism v evolution and his stance on big pharma...and Vietnam, back in the day...

oh, also a big po-mo deflator...which I think maybe needed doing but maybe has been way overdone...

But judging from his wikipedia entry, Mr Crews is quite a productive satirist and critic, and perhaps another of those prominent writers (like Tony Tanner et al) that I never heard of before - thanks for the intro...


before he turned on Freud like a rebellious son, is, to me a way
>of framing our guy TRP who never 'turned' on Freud, just found that his rebellious son Jung was
>a little more...universal?..poetic?...anthromythic?....all of the above?
>

I don't see a lot of Jung in Pynchon, but I'm willing to learn more... 

 Anyway, I see the Traverse story in AtD as so consciously embodying this subject motif that  .....it can seem
>TOO simplistic-----which it would be if it were not embedded in much else and if it were not so intellectually
>done....I mean, with attendant nuance......
> 
>

both Jung and Freud applied ancient myths to modern psychology, and although this approach has its pitfalls (as later-Crews attacked it), it probably also has some merits (as earlier-Crews embraced it)

Freud maybe broke the ground, Jung pulled in a wider variety of stuff, and then Joseph Campbell kind of systematized it and took it out of "treatment of pathology" into a more generic approach...

Let's start the arguments with why, exactly (but not only). did TRP have Lake marry her dad's killer?
>
and stay married to him so long!  Yikes! 
So there is like this archetypal wave - rebellion, revenge, and so forth - and Lake rides on it all the way up to the beach!
I'm inclined to liken it to Frenesi and Brock, but there are many differences.

Why indeed - There's a bit of interiorized Lake-speak about it that I will have to find later today...
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