Why Windust & Maxine?

[Fiona Shnapple]

Pynchon wrote a Foreword to Orwell's 1984. Can't find a copy just now,
but someone with better Googling skills might Google it up for us and
post it here or find it in the P-L Archives and re-post it.

This novel, BE is Pynchon's 1984.

Not trying to confuse matters but some of the major themes about
family, family values, what Brock calls the un-holy triangle,
Frenesi's children (her daughter, the Protagonist of the novel, and
her son) are continued here in BE.

So, Big Brother,  Brock and Raygun and the rest are keen to capitalize
on the family and how it is produced and kept, both productive for Big
Brother and anti-productive for the family and for life of Proles.

See, there is one huge difference in Pynchon's 1984, and that is that
the Proles are not entirely ignorant. In 1984, the Proles are all
there is left of hope that one day Big Brother will be overthrown, but
they are ignorant of their power, and Orwell makes this power
explicitly sexual, the production of more proles, the fertility of the
Proles and their family values as opposed to the States. Of course,
the one-to-one analogy breaks dow quickly once we get into the
details, so the State is not Oceania, NYC is not Airstrip One
(London), but themes are the same. I like to toss in The Brave New
World and would even add Postman to the mix because in BE, as in our
1984, the State Power is, because the Proles are not ignorant, a
matter of amusement--that is, the Proles have, to add another relevant
analogy here, gotten out of the Platonic Cave, but have elected to
spend most of their time in it, watching shadows on the wall. So much
so that they can't even remember the Sun, and have no will to
discover, or even try to discover Truth. Of course, it's not easy, if
even possible to discover the Truth, but that doesn't mean its not
worth the effort.

As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across to the window.
The sun must have gone down behind the houses; it was not shining into the
yard any longer. The flagstones were wet as though they had just been
washed, and he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh
and pale was the blue between the chimney-pots. Tirelessly the woman
marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling
silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more. He wondered
whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of twenty
or thirty grandchildren. Julia had come across to his side; together they
gazed down with a sort of fascination at the sturdy figure below. As he
looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching
up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him
for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to
him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by
childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the
grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and
after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block
of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body
of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held
inferior to the flower?

'She's beautiful,' he murmured.

'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.

'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.

He held Julia's supple waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip to
the knee her flank was against his. Out of their bodies no child would
ever come. That was the one thing they could never do. Only by word of
mouth, from mind to mind, could they pass on the secret. The woman down
there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile
belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might
easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps,
of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized
fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been
laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending,
scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over
thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical
reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of
the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney-pots into
interminable distance. It was curious to think that the sky was the same
for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people
under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world,
hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant
of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and
yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but who
were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that
would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles!
Without having read to the end of THE BOOK, he knew that that must be
Goldstein's final message. The future belonged to the proles. And could he
be sure that when their time came the world they constructed would not be
just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party? Yes,
because at the least it would be a world of sanity. Where there is
equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen, strength
would change into consciousness. The proles were immortal, you could not
doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the end
their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a
thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds,
passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share
and could not kill.

'Do you remember,' he said, 'the thrush that sang to us, that first day,
at the edge of the wood?'

'He wasn't singing to us,' said Julia. 'He was singing to please himself.
Not even that. He was just singing.'

The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing. All round the
world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious,
forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin,
in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and
Japan--everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous
by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.
Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come.
You were the dead, theirs was the future. But you could share in that
future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed
on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.

'We are the dead,' he said.

'We are the dead,' echoed Julia dutifully.

'You are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them.


On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 8:19 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Her making Brock mad by her mere existence is understandable, but her
> attraction to him, less so.
>
>
> On Saturday, December 14, 2013, Fiona Shnapple wrote:
>>
>> Terry Caesar's article, "MOtherhood and Post-Modernism" is worth
>> reading on this question.
>>
>> Motherhood and Postmodernism
>> Author(s): Terry Caesar
>> Source: American Literary History, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring, 1995), pp.
>> 120-140
>>
>>
>> And here, a wonderful piece on The Girl.
>>
>>
>> http://sfonline.barnard.edu/gender-justice-and-neoliberal-transformations/the-girl-mergers-of-feminism-and-finance-in-neoliberal-times/
>>
>> Pynchon is still re-working Orwell's Prole Woman with red arms (1984);
>> she sings and hangs clothes and is the ignorant fertility of
>> revolution. But her fecundity, as with Maxine's, though she produces
>> only boys, is a force that makes Brock Vond mad.
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l