Why Windust & Maxine?

Sun Dec 15 07:35:25 CST 2013

Beautiful post.
I just started to read BE again, so I'll look for your thesis as I do. But
didn't Pynchon say somewhere that he'd learned to not be "literary,"
meaning, I think, building a story on references to a previous great work?

David Morris

On Sunday, December 15, 2013, Fiona Shnapple wrote:

> 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<javascript:;>>
> 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
>
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