Back to AtD. TRP & homos

[Mark Kohut]

Rich writes:
fair enough but if Pynchon wants to drill down to a more
character-based fiction as he did in ATD why must his depictions of
not so vanilla sex always be based on some Tom of Finland S&M schema.
 
---I think case can be made he uses gay sex to show when sex is 'bad', not 
healthy, good and natural....

it's not really a dig at the old Pyncher just a quirk he has, control
being a clenched fist he cant seem to relax. at times to me while
reading the Cyprian scenes is here we go again. Pynchon can depict
homosexual love only in the abstract/general sense ("men free to love
in the trenches") but not in the particular as he can with
hetero-situations.    
 
----yeahp, we hardly even got an offhand remark about attraction or love
etc...(one about Reef's slim haunches I remember). 
 
 again, there isnt anything wrong with that but we
should point out a failing when we see it

rich

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 6:19 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> A defence of theory, including Queer Theory, or criticism generally,
> something along the lines of Frye's "Polemical Introduction" to his
> _Anatomy of Criticism_, might rest on the potential for misreading
> Pynchon's lovers in AGTD as some kind of moral condemnation of sexual
> liberty. The sex, it seems to me, is nearly beside the point. If we
> want to read homosexual encounters we can do better than Pynchon.
> Indeed, while Pynchon has his dog-eared copy of Rougemont down off the
> shelf as he writes these scenes, as Updike and Marques do as well, he
> has new equations, new films, new theories in play (Foucault, not
> evident in GR). Like his master, Melville, Pynchon does put a cannibal
> in a Christians bed, erects a harpoon, and squeezes sperm in the
> heavens, but not because he wants to say anything about homosexuals,
> not really, or because he hopes to sell his books in the basement
> shops where proud gay men meet closeted ones, or anything the audience
> is longing to read, but because these scenes further his artistic
> objectives.
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