Why Windust & Maxine?

[Fiona Shnapple]

I agree to all you say here. Though I prefer the term sex, not gender, for
male/female.

The patriarch power of Puritan to Protestant western males makes expending
with the males remote, as the goal, as Weissmann with his strap on plastic
cunt symbolizes, is to wrestle the reproductive power from scatterbrained
mother, to produce a virtual nature. Winston, of course, And Julia, are
dead and sterile. The can't produce a child. In prison, Winston meets a
woman who may be his mother. He can't say if she is or not. Like slaves,
cut off at the root from the mother, the mother culture, language. Control
the mode of re- production.  cut the artist from the art and the audience.
 The consumer not the artist is the maker. but the postmodern generation
has no aesthetic and anything is possible, postmodern humanism.
Tolstoy's what is art? It is a maker and one who appreciates the artist and
the art. But, Jameson in mass reproduction, from Benjamin, gives us the
silk screen mass production of Andy w's shoes, not van gough's painting of
the shoes. Maxine no more wants to shop than go to the opera. She wants to
shoot.

On Monday, December 16, 2013, David Morris wrote:

> The reproductive power of the female has from ancient times made her a
> power, a dark mystery.  If any gender is expendable, it is the male.
>  Female solo reproduction is possible now.  Biodiversity, chance, is what
> will be lost if reproduction is chained to the machine.  Fragility of the
> species will be unavoidable.  But species might soon be a past barrier.
>  1984's Proles and Brave New World's Injuns are not only a wild card, they
> are the diversity needed for long term survival.
>
> David Morris
>
> On Monday, December 16, 2013, Fiona Shnapple wrote:
>
> But what about sex? Sex, that is, male or female, is not culturally
> assigned, is not a gender role. Maxine is a female and the mother of two
> males. Zoyd is male, and not, as Prairie insists, her mother. So, while the
> common and universal power structures and gender roles often collapse, fail
> to predict what characters will do, motivation, etc., the universal is not
> in the gender role, but in the sex, the female can reproduce, can give
> birth to a son or daughter, or both, even in one labor. Not so the male.
> This makes a world if difference in the world, though technology, as P
> notes in his essay on 1984, is moving to make the female obsolete.
>
> On Monday, December 16, 2013, Joseph Tracy wrote:
>
> Far too simplistic in my view.  First of all these are universally common
> power structures and culturally assigned  gender roles , but they break
> down as predictors of individual  patterns both in the world and in P's
> fictions.. Many  males in P's work  don't fit this pattern, and neither do
> the females universally follow this pattern.  DL & Takeshi interdependent,
>  Zoyd is nurturing, Prairie , Ditzha & Zippi ? Sister Rochelle ( head
> ninja) Miles Blundell, Yashmeen, Hunter Penhollow, Slothrop,  Cyprian,
> Victoria V
> It seems to me that  almost none of P's main characters easily fit this
> mold and those characters that do are used to define achetypal patterns of
> disfunction and  human need more than the gender patterns you lay out.
>
> There is a distinct shortage of credible women in Pynchon which is a large
> flaw. I know few women who fit his patterns and many who do not.
>
> My feeling is that he uses these gender roles and particularly the
> unlikely sexual  attractions to describe more universal cultural
> attractions and habits: Vibe lusts to have a worthy son, Kit lusts to find
> a worthy father.  Rachel Owlglass lusts for the car, Lake Traverse is
> seduced by the Bad Boys and masochism,  Frenesi, Maxine, Enzian  secretly
> lust after the position  and security of  the
> cop/soldier/fascist/strongman.   These are psychological patterns that are
> real,  have had survival benefits for the gamewinners but also allow the
> darkest colonial patterns of abuse, waste and trivilialization.  For
> Pynchon they are the story matrix for a large variety of individual actions
> which seem increasingly irrelevant to the possibility of altering the
>  globally dominant patterns of abuser/abused regardless of the tendency of
> these patterns  toward outward-inward, forward-backward, personal-global
> all-inclusive  destructiveness .  P. also seems to me to sadly note the
> antipathy of these psychological diseases to our actual biospheric natural
> spiritual matrix- a matrix which our games relegate to background for the
> wonderful drama of psycho-social war.
>
>
> On Dec 15, 2013, at 10:51 PM, David Morris wrote:
>
> > It really doesn't matter which P novel you want to pick.  The power
> structure is the same.  Details vary, but Fiona has got the main points
> correct.  Male is War, Dominance, the Construct of Insecurity. Female is
> its counter: Survival, Embracing Security, Accommodation.  There are many
> other dichotomies in P's novels, but these are biggies.
> >
> >
> > On Sunday, December 15, 2013, Joseph Tracy wrote:
> >
> > On Dec 15, 2013, at 7:43 AM, Fiona Shnapple wrote:
> > >
> > > 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.
> > I would say that Vineland was closer to being P's 1984 , and more really
> of a compare and contrast with both1984 predictions and BraveNew World
> predictions.  Turns out you don't need feelies , regular TV will do. And
> drugs are hard to control. Some people can be reprogrammed ( Frenesi?) but
> it's harder than it looks. TV is about as good as it gets if what you want
> is a nation of Zombies. Brock dreams of becoming the Minister of Truth but
> the 1984 vision is incompatible with market theories and is canned as he is.
> >
> > >
> > > 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.
> >  Yes,  so they put out variations on Father Knows Best and  Cop shows.
> But market forces are offering too many options and families, communities,
>  are morphing accordingly. Totalitarianism has so much to keep track of
>  and loses a lot of sex appeal  and kindly but firm  fathe
>
>
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