Review: Thomas Pynchon’s “Bleeding Edge” (David Auerbach @ The American Reader)

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Now THAT'S what I call a review!

It offers, among many other things, food for thought in a current debate:

"It takes sex to knock Maxine out of her cynical gumshoe pose. Where the 
typical PI would fall for the femme fatale prior to realizing her 
deviousness, Maxine falls prey to masculine wiles in spite of knowing 
exactly what she’s dealing with. For two hundred pages, Maxine 
skillfully interrogates corporate flunkies, foot fetishists, and 
olfactory precogs, and then abruptly throws herself into the arms of the 
far more malevolent überspook and “federal penis” Nicholas Windust. 
Creepy, overbearing, and charmless, with a long track record of 
state-sponsored torture and murder, Windust has only to mumble a few 
words breathily, and Maxine, or more precisely Maxine’s libido, falls 
hard for him.

This is not a new story for Mr. Pynchon. Here is a sampling of how often 
he has used it:

Pynchon Graph 1

The woman-jerk motif is just one prominent case of how Mr. Pynchon uses 
recurrent patterns rather than linear plotting to structure his novels. 
Regularities emerge /not/ on the micro-level, where plot developments 
often seem random and pointless, but on the statistical macro-scale 
level. For any individual woman, the motivation provided never seems 
sufficient—sometimes no explanation is given—but it keeps happening, 
like a law of nature. In /Vineland/, Frenesi and her mother Sasha 
Traverse speculate that their attraction to uniformed men is an 
“ancestral curse…as if some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence 
requiring this form of seduction and initiation into the dark joys of 
social control.” Mr. Pynchon later gave further credence to this theory 
by having their great-aunt Lake Traverse enact a very similar betrayal 
in /Against the Day/. Many of these women repent; some, like Katje, even 
try to undo the damage. But Maxine’s self-awareness puts her far beyond 
anyone else in the above table. Maxine is puzzled at her own compulsion, 
and feels a mixture of self-disgust and helplessness. She is not so 
puritanical as to loathe her own libido, but neither is it within her 
conscious control: “she must have been wet without knowing it.” Unlike 
Frenesi in /Vineland/, she is not so dumb as to believe she can redeem 
Windust, and so she does not endanger her family and betray her 
principles as Frenesi does. We are a far ways from Frenesi’s shrug, “You 
know what happens when my pussy’s runnin’ the show.”

Maxine finds she can’t resist, but her exasperating compulsion spurs a 
will to understand and forgive—not only Windust, but Horst. Her 
understanding cuts the federal penis down to size. Attempts to control 
are, after all, the cruel and ultimately futile efforts of scared little 
boys; the information age gives Maxine the wisdom to understand this. It 
does not, however, give her the power to change it. As so often in game 
theory, additional knowledge can be a handicap to action, not an aid. 
Even as March drowns in conspiracy theories only to gain conspiracy 
freak followers, Maxine keeps a keenly skeptical eye on everything and 
sorts through the information, only to find that it is impossible to 
master and does not cohere."

So Maxine belongs but then again belongs not in the row?

On 09.10.2013 00:03, Dave Monroe wrote:
> http://theamericanreader.com/review-thomas-pynchons-bleeding-edge/
> -
> Pynchon-l /http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l