Back to AtD. Mother love w/ one's father involved

[Mark Kohut]

You are onto something at least--maybe some things--but I am only adressing one here.
Which one is: when I wrote children, I was too vague. What I meant was very young children---
from baby Ljubica to toddler---the little girl in Inherent Vice. 
 
And that Pynchon uses them as absolute innocents, as not yet caught in any web of They-We complicity,
so to speak. As young or younger than the innocents massacred at Sandy Hook, which so hurt so many of Us (in ways other massacres did not, it seems). As emblems, even symbols and as many smart plisters feel--in lame, cliched ways; in gooey sentimentality;
they are a mark of his creative falling--off......and maybe you even think that?
 
And it is a case I respect a lot. (Even though I thought, fanboy still, that P knows the heart-tuggingness of real innocence in our collective
consciousness. 


________________________________
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> 
Sent: Tuesday, January 1, 2013 9:13 AM
Subject: Re: Back to AtD. Mother love w/ one's father involved

Children are important to early and late works; the Secret
Integration, for example, is focused on children, is, as is AGTD,
influenced by childrens' adventure books, and by Mark Twain's
satirical use of children to expose adult weaknesses and the like. In
this early work that P considers his finest Slow Learner period story,
and not merely because it holds up so well when set against the
others, the creating of life, of a new human being, does not make the
adults more loving or caring, either of their own children or of the
children of others, and, although P shows Dickensian love for his
young characters, they are often like his foolish adults, paranoid
counter-cultureists who resort to violent means of resistance and
rebellion, and flounder and fail. Becoming a father or mother does not
automatically make a P character a better person, certainly the
mothers of GR and of V. and VL are none too loving all the time. MAson
certainly is a better man, or more complete and rounded out character
because of his relationship with father and son & Co., but we can't
say thatr Prairie makes Zoyd a better person, though, of course, he
tries and does gain our sympathy to a certain extent. The fathers in
AGTD are not all good by any stretch....and so on.

I see no major change in the use or treatment of the children or
parenting....though I know this is a standard critical or review
claim; Pynchon gets better in some ways, exhausting in others, not
sure if his being a father has anything to do with it.

> Yashmeen on remeeting her father for the first time since 1900: "Whatever
> his feelings might prove to be,
> her own were not so much in conflict now as expanded."
>
> I think that is a marvelous insight into what having a child can do. i think
> Tolstoy says something like it (but
> quite differently). Creating life, a new human being and,perforce, loving
> her spreads feelings of love and dissolves
> many mental conflicts about other significant folk. Who sez P is not a
> decent psychologist of human beings. Late P did do some focusing on kids, as
> we've said? P continues:
>
> "Her love for Ljubica being impenetrable and indivisible as a prime number,
> other loves must be accordingly reevaluated."
> Apt mathematical metaphor about our mathematician, yashmeen.
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