Pynchons Problem

[Michael Bailey]

 rich wrote:

> "Postwar novelists—Updike, Mailer—were male triumphalists. Their
> successors—Franzen, Shteyngart—have overcorrected. They want women to like
> them. Their men are losers."
> that's what's happened to Pynchon, too
>

I dunno, first I dunno that male triumphalism is something we miss in
Pynchon ...not that it's there anyway, but I don't find myself wishing
for more of it there (or anywhere else)

ok, you did say "over"corrected...

I was thinking of specific expressions vis a vis triumphalism -
(male triumphalism being, I guess, by way of osmosis from American
triumphalism, the notion that excesses on the part of the triumphing
party - excesses that harm others - are not mistakes that need
correction, but pardonable by-products of natural superiority, right?)

-- when Pynchon's take, insofar as I claim to follow it, in V. has
Rachel and Paola (a-and Mafia gets a real cool poem) bearing the torch
of authenticity while not a man in the plot (with the exception of
Josephine's father, a bit character whose suit BP borrows for a job
interview) is worth a farthing.

a-and in GR we see the male delusions of Pointsman, Major Marvy,
Weissmann, and of course the IG Farben/Nazi faction, come to rather
spectacular naught, and (a bit more sympathetically) those of Roger,
Pirate, Enzian, Tchitcherine and Slothrop himself,  unravel to scraps
and shreds...
while the characters one contemplates with affection are Leni,
struggling to feed her baby, aligning herself with Rosa Luxembourg and
world labor; Greta Erdman; and that Wiccan chick with the owl...



I can think of some textual evidence of it in Mailer, but really there
are contraindications there, like that long-short about the guy who
like, does it really rough to this girl every which way in order to
experience the triumph or whatnot, and the conclusion the story leaves
you with pretty much is that the guy, and this urge, is profoundly
"latent homosexual" as the phrase used to go...and not in a good
way...

Updike, well, gosh, I don't know his oeuvre all that well, but I was
never struck by that idea.
Much more by how very well he described stuff recognizably...and,
well, like that blurb about Camus that I keep not being able to
source, reading him I'm often impressed by "the decency of his
impulses"

anyway, here's something to ponder -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_count
"The average sperm count today is between 20 and 40 million per
milliliter in the Western world, having decreased by 1-2% per year
from a substantially higher number decades ago.[8]" --       do you
suppose that this has any effect on the Zeitgeist?