Why Windust & Maxine?

[Fiona Shnapple]

I don't want to put too much weight on that 1984 essay, but P outlines, it
seems to me, his Education, his Slow Learner, Henry Adams Education in the
essay, as he draws up the parallel between slow learner, Winston, a stand
in for Orwell, who recognizes, in his anger, the mystical music, the
reverence for the fecundity of the pop song, the Prole's imperishable
production of life, and its work and song, then, sketches Orwell's slow
learning of the detective genre, one he rejects, for its violence, but
comes to see the poignant humor of, even of the Big D, even after torture,
of a Prole as he is cast as coin, a penny or half pence, under Big Ben in
the balance, but then, meets Windust, a zealot for whom financial motives
are worthless, for he is driven by the use and abuse of powder for its own
sake. And these Zealots, like the old woman in March's fable, have to
price, can't be bought off at any price, are on both, or all sides. As in
GR, what is at stake is not money, or capital, real estate, but
metaphysics, the war is not for greed or domination of resources,
geopolitical positioning, but for the Past, what, as WC in M&d reminds us,
is tangled in the history that belongs to the people, because, as Orwell's
Party knew, control of the past is control of the future, of the mixing, as
Eliot sez, of memory, desire, and language. The degradation of language
involves a concomitant denigration of thought. The stakes are what is, what
the Greeks called Being, so Ontological Control, and as P says in the
essays, memory is nor hard to control, desire is much tougher, though, as
he says, that's in 1984, in 2010, technology, has made it easy enough.
On Sunday, December 15, 2013, David Morris wrote:

> OK.  I buy that this schema fits P's repeated woman/cop coupling.  But I
> think it points to P's insistence on fitting the world into his image of it
> which really hobbles his art.  It is a similar strategy to linking to a
> previous master's work.  It is like trying to make a mathematical equation
> into art.  He does that in GR.  maybe he should eat some shrooms.
>
> David Morris
>
> On Sunday, December 15, 2013, Fiona Shnapple wrote:
>
>> Why is Frenesi / Maxine attracted to fascists, to cops...etc.
>>
>> Contrary to what the reviews, critics and some here have argued, I
>> think P does a great job of laying this out in VL, an even better job
>> of laying it out here in BE. Some may not be convinced by his
>> argument, but that doesn't mean it
>> s not spelled out in black and white.
>>
>> Take Maxine, cause she's the latest, and cause she's got the same
>> attraction. What is it about her that makes her say Good Night to
>> Nick? That makes her take his cock through her torn hoes?
>>
>> There are several causes not one, but they all spring from the same
>> place, her desire to use her fecund force to counter the man and his
>> machine force.But she can't counter the machine force with penis, a
>> gun, or even a camera/penis/gun. Maxine has guns and she uses them.
>> She has boys, only boys, and she plays their gun game, thinking that
>> the shooter might give them the skills needed to work in her calling.
>> But she is deceiving herself. Her force is so great, so natural, but
>> she doesn't know it, and even when she realizes it, the boys are
>> moving toward Horst, she'll have to deal with that, and she can't hold
>> on to them, she has to let them go. But the Sisterhood, her's is with
>> child, March is reconciled with Tallis, is a force still, if only they
>> would stop playing at the gun games of the men, who, of course, have
>> not the great power of life.
>>
>> 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
>>
>
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