Why Windust & Maxine?

[Mark Kohut]

I, too, think Fiona's a terrif post....I think P buries 1984 beautifully within a "non-literary' book.


From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
To: Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com> 
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Sunday, December 15, 2013 7:35 AM
Subject: Re: Why Windust & Maxine?



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> 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
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20131216/a64c4175/attachment.html>