Horst-Maxine-Windust

[John Bailey]

I think this argument is based on a false dichotomy which Pynchon
deliberately constructs, in this case based on tropes from the
romantic genre and especially from TV/Hollywood romantic comedy.

Horst vs Windust gives rise to the convention of the Wrong Partner, in
which a dialectic of partner preference is used to play out a
conversation between desirable but apparently exclusive character
traits (or even larger traits of a society itself). So you have the
companionate marriage versus the passionate but untenable affair, or
the boring but reliable wrong partner versus the exciting and chaotic,
or the monied versus the earthy, or the hard worker versus the
gadabout. Pynchon knows that this convention is deeply, deeply
entrenched in our romantic narratives and that we will pit Horst
against Windust. He makes them both attractive depending upon your own
angle of incidence. And equally unattractive by other routes.

To ask whether we're supposed to sympathise with/forgive/forbid either
of these guys is to take an oddly naive realist perspective on the
writer we're all pretty well-versed in doing anything but, which is
again why I find this book so fascinating. By engaging with modes that
aren't so self-consciously, erm, self-conscious, he has us quite
forgetting ourselves.

On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 1:05 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ok, go for it. A passage, a page. Anything at all, from the book.
>
>
> On Sunday, February 23, 2014, <bandwraith at aol.com> wrote:
>>
>> I'll leave what Horst 'should' do to you and stick with what he does,
>> in the book, which is not much. He's loathsome.
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com>
>> To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Sun, Feb 23, 2014 7:28 pm
>> Subject: Re: Horst-Maxine-Windust
>>
>>
>> Who ain't to blame? Right? We all just a bunch of dollar diggers
>> dumping all our shit on the rest of the world.  Horst should quit his
>> job, repent, go live in a monastery or a commune. But that ain't in the
>> book.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 7:05 PM, <bandwraith at aol.com> wrote:
>>
>> Horst is no more guilty than Windust. They both share in the blame for
>> 11 Sept.
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com>
>> To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>>
>>
>> Sent: Sun, Feb 23, 2014 5:24 pm
>> Subject: Re: Horst-Maxine-Windust
>>
>>
>>
>> If anyone in this novel resembles Vibe, it is Ice, not Horst. Horst
>> cheats on his wife. Infidelity is not a crime in NYC. She's no Mother
>> Maxina. The family is, fairly typical of the UWS,  it functions in a
>> dysfunctional world. That Horst, according to Maxine, once put his
>> hands around her throat and choked her, and that he still loses it over
>> trivial shit like the missing Chunky Monkey ice cream, is all I can
>> find in the novel to make him less than Pynchon's most sympathetic
>> characters. Dixon, for example, is far from perfect. His abuse of the
>> females is not excused by his whipping of the slave driver. Slothrop's,
>> Zoyd, the list goes on. Horst is a good father, a decent guy. And,
>> again, his skill, luck, independence, and great fortune, are matched
>> against he neo liberals, neo techs, the brave new world that has taken
>> his trade, his job. So, again, he is more like the author than Max, who
>> is, subjected to the harshest satire. She bends and takes Windust
>> through her torn hoes. Like Frenesi on her knees. Horst is on a
>> different vibe.
>> On Sunday, February 23, 2014, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Alice, with all due respect,  I can withdraw my two lines supposedly
>> summing up my view of Wall Street and the argument ( within the
>> fiction) still stands.....my 'associative', descriptive leap " to the
>> 1%"---simple fact re Horst; drop the Occupy resonances if you want,
>> ....and the niceness of Wall Streeters is just a tail. " Niceness was
>> to pickup on Morris's good-heartedness and simply to
>> Say many of the very rich can be very " nice"....
>>
>>
>> I brought out some textual NotNicenesses earlier.
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>> On Feb 23, 2014, at 2:25 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Mark,
>>
>> With all due respect,your view of "wall street" is superficial and
>> distorted and so the conclusions you draw are ridiculous.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 1:18 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Yes, Horst makes money.....a 'wonderful' quality in all of TRP's
>> fiction....one of his deep authorial thematic identifications. THIS IS
>> SARCASM.
>>
>> Rich Horst cheated on Maxine. Rich Horst seems to have left Maxine with
>> little (but the 'house") as they say.
>>
>> Horst can seem to sense where the money will be....like Jay Gould? Or a
>> Vibe?
>>
>> Watching bad TV is TRP's way of saying he is his culture, mindless,
>> with an "inhuman"---[in the sense his skill
>> happens without much interaction with human beings...he doesn't make
>> anything, create anything--even a 'team"]
>> skill for getting rich. He is the 1%, with an overt "niceness"---why
>> shouldn't he be? He is Wall Street.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sunday, February 23, 2014 12:44 AM, David Morris
>> <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> He is a very sympathetic character in BE.  He seems almost pure
>> hearted.  He watches bad TV, but makes tons of dough. What reader
>> wouldn't want to be in his shoes? Would that we could be so lucky.
>>
>> On Saturday, February 22, 2014, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> What? Don't like Horst? Why? He has money?
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l