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

[Bekah]

Indeed!   Lots of good stuff there.   Stuff I was kind of trying to get a handle on but felt really limited.   It's at: 

http://theamericanreader.com/review-thomas-pynchons-bleeding-edge/

Bekah


On Oct 9, 2013, at 4:58 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've only just scanned this 'review' but it looks like a must-read for
> P-listers.
> 
> On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 10:23 PM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>> 
>> 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/?listpynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

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