CoL49 Emotionality

[Mark Kohut]

Steve points to:
"She wondered then if worrying affected his performance. Having once been
seventeen and ready to laugh at almost anything, she found herself overcome
by, call it a tenderness she'd never quite go to the back of lest she get
bogged. It kept her from asking him and more questions. Like all their
inabilities to communicate, this too had a virtuous motive."



yes, markedly..sensitive? (Remember Oedipa thought she might be a
'sensitive' as P adds his resonances.) Pynchon's feminism,
perhaps, as we talked of before on this List? One might write an essay on
the old-fashioned 19th century-like, shortened-Jamesian. psychological
movements of Oedipa's mind, right?, hidden amidst her overt quest. We get
this after she has been self-unwrapped with Metzger---too obviously a
hidebound California Young Repub woman now loosening up? She cries after
Metzger says, that  Pierce said "She wouldn't be easy?" Why did she cry?
This is adultery she commits, against the man she is going to think about
very soon in the way we see below ---has it happened before? but not like
this time?
Adultery was--is--usually a central act with the most far-reaching
consequences, esp for women maybe, especially then and times before
then---and esp in fiction!
Brian Moore's fine *The Doctor's Wife* of the 70s or so was, as Anthony
Burgess said,  a quietly revolutionary novel since it showed full bourgeois
Anna Karenina-like real love adultery leading to a new self, a completely
new emotional life and HAPPINESS beyond the wife's imagining. Madame
Bovary, she dead. Perhaps as emotionally liberating in its fictional way as
Fear of Flying was sexually liberating for many woman, all the good girls,
on the page but in the life beyond that page too.

Discuss and connect.
Second post to come.



On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 11:24 AM, Steven Koteff <steviekoteff at gmail.com>
wrote:

> In advance of the BtZ read, I am just starting a slow and hopefully deep,
> experiential reread of this book. Haven't read it in several years.
>
> The book is so much more emotionally complicated, and smart than I ever
> realized. I think as a reader accustomed to normaler fiction you have a
> hard time A) getting the emotion behind the uniqueness and occasional
> density of the prose, and B) processing a book that just doesn't spend its
> time working in scene/plot in conventional ways or at a conventional pace.
> Maybe you could call this a shortcoming of the book--GR and M&D, in my
> opinion, operate with much more immersive scenery.
>
> But still, this book is just really smart about human pain and loneliness.
> This is something TRP does not get enough credit for from
> non-Pynchontoligists.
>
> Here's Oedipa, contemplating sympathy for Mucho and his difficulty
> overcoming the fear of statutory rape prosecution with regards to his
> attraction to high schoolers (this is pp 32-3 of the HPMC paperback):
>
> "She wondered then if worrying affected his performance. Having once been
> seventeen and ready to laugh at almost anything, she found herself overcome
> by, call it a tenderness she'd never quite go to the back of lest she get
> bogged. It kept her from asking him and more questions. Like all their
> inabilities to communicate, this too had a virtuous motive."
>
> I mean I know he gets certain elements of relationship dynamics,
> especially sexual power maybe, very right. And that's on display here. But
> the other insights and complexities are not necessarily ones I was
> expecting. -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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