BtZ42 Section 9 (pp 53-60): Jessica wakes

[Mark Kohut]

Esther at a party in V is a fine 'compare and contrast'. Here her 'greater
maturity' in getting Brad reminds me, sort of in embryo, of the embodied
'maturity' of Jessica and Scorpia in GR. These women do know how to "play
the game" better than the men. They won't--as we see them--give up
everything for love. Love will be a good thing they will get and play with.
That non-feminist characterization of women in love---"not a thing apart,
but their whole existence"---does not hold. It is the men who lose it all
over love (in GR) and over Rebekah and the others maybe too (although the
nuances multiply).

Who said TRP is a feminist besides some of us? In this way, with a now more
fungible word, he is, I suggest.

ON THE OTHER HAND, notice in this almost-perfect section selection: He
touches her, a stranger at a party and....it goes thru her like a touch--
the spot every man has found-- that melts her into female posturing (yes ?)
( I haven't read Forster's MAURICE but I remember from notices that the
repressed guy is moved toward being seduced by a touch in the small of the
back. Man to man love).

 Remember, Brad touches her uninvited, without a shared bandwidth of
understanding. I don't know about such parties in the 50s,  except the
social self-armor was supposed to be heavy and repression rife (and I'll
say the 60s were different because 60s) but since then such a touch would
often be seen as a microaggression, a small violation of one's self, no? A
small 'authoritarian' gesture to enable an interpersonal connection, maybe?
("Just reach up and touch their hair, they like that", a more confident
older guy (asshole?) once told me. Advice I never followed). Is this a
small fascist gesture that can remind of other later women in TRP's work?
We know who they are.

On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 7:02 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> No question that P has a Young Girl thing -- but this time through GR I'm
> noticing more that's indicative of Jessica's greater maturity (per above,
> Roger is often framed vis-a-vis her as a little boy). Ditto for
> ghost-Rebekah, Dally, Yashmeen, Maxine...
>
> And never forget this cock- (or cockiness-) shriveling passage, Esther at
> a party in V.:
>
> At the window she gazed out toward the river, seeing nothing but fog. A
> hand touched her spine, exactly in that spot every man she ever knew had
> been able to find, sooner or later. She straightened up, squeezing her
> shoulderblades together, moving her breasts taut and suddenly visible
> toward the window. She could see his reflection watching their
> reflection. She turned. He was blushing. Crew cut, suit, Harris tweed.
> “Say, you are new,” she smiled. “I am Esther.”
>
>    He blushed and was cute. “Brad,” he said. “I’m sorry I made you jump.”
>
>    She knew instinctively: he will be fine as the fraternity boy just out
> of an Ivy League school who knows he will never stop being a fraternity
> boy as long as he lives. But who still feels he is missing something, and
> so hangs at the edges of the Whole Sick Crew. If he is going into
> management, he writes. If he is an engineer or architect why he paints or
> sculpts. He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he
> is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why
> there should ever have been a line, or even if there is a line at all. He
> will learn how to be a twinned man and will go on at the game, straddling
> until he splits up the crotch and in half from the prolonged tension, and
> then he will be destroyed. She assumed ballet fourth position, moved her
> breasts at a 45° angle to his line-of-sight, pointed her nose at his
> heart, looked up at him through her eyelashes.
>
>    “How long have you been in New York?”
>
>
> OK, two male-gaze looks at her breasts -- but that's strikingly clear-eyed
> for an Ivy League grad in his early twenties. I know that when I read it as
> an Ivy League undergrad at 18, dating in and around NYC and sometimes even
> at parties like that, it made a powerful and lasting impression on me. Can
> there be any question that Esther is smarter, wiser, and better at the game
> than Brad will ever be?
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160512/ac8c3feb/attachment.html>