Why Windust & Maxine?

[Fiona Shnapple]

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/jameson/jameson.html

http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r14.html

http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/havelspeech.html

On Monday, December 16, 2013, Fiona Shnapple wrote:

> 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 o
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20131216/b35b15c0/attachment.html>