Why Windust & Maxine?

[Joseph Tracy]

The male is also necessary, and the stability of a home/community/safety/health/learning for raising a child. I am not denying the realities of sexual reproduction but the idea that males equate to dominance and war... and woman to accomodation, survival... either in P's work or the work of the world.

Part of the problem with this stereotype is that it does not account for the feminine role in wanting powerful dominant mates that give not only security but superior status and competing for this place. This pattern is not just a mark of warrior societies but any society where status and wealth are important.  And it obviously shows up in Pynchon. The idea that this urge is entirely benign or salvific is dreamy nonsense.

We need a large feminization of cultural wisdom in this nasty civilization. No doubt.  But it has to transform men and women from the current patterns.  
On Dec 16, 2013, at 7:57 PM, 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.
> >
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> > 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  father appeal when gunning down Bishops and nuns and blowing up tree lovers and college students.
> >
> > >
> > > 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.
> > Well part of the point of 1984  is how hard it is to enforce that ignorance  and that the entire function of a totalitarian  state revolves around enforcing that ignorance.   Brave New World proposes that mindless contentment is better than enforcement and takes less effort, so in this case the state functions like  God in a garden where only .1 % taste the fruit of metacognition, and they can just be removed from the Garden.
> > In essence  1984= fascist totalitarianism  BNW= socialist totalitarianism.  But I think P is addressing the peculiar blending that leads to a capitalist totalitarianism  backed with an international military and a fading democratic facade. In other words the system that actually has emerged since WW2
> >
> > The core difference is that the success of  the psychological totalitarianism of  capitalism relies on the degree to which it is internalized as a reasonably free choice among competing products and ideas, lifestyles and affinities. Those choices will by faith always improve in diversity and quality as by evolutionary process even though the choice of say living in a wild place outside the dominant paradigm is no more an option than the perfectly sane choice of a nuclear free technology or demilitarized politics, or even toxin-free food air and water.
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