Liss/stepvr but also Molly Hite

[Mark Kohut]

>From the good Molly Hite from this book. And a personal anecdote. I
recently unearthed my first copy of V, the (former) Modern library edition.
It had the bookmark
where i stopped out of reading it. At the scene with the Whole Sick Crew
and Paola in the pool hall. I didn't get the Sick in sick crew with the
attempted rape of Paola.
young and alienated like a privileged bougeois boy, and even stupider than
I am now, I thought I was supposed to identify almost fully with The Whole
Sick Crew.

The existence of the Pynchon boys’ club became especially evident at the
1991 MLA session on *Vineland* (1990), which I had proposed as the first
overtly feminist panel on Pynchon, on the premise that *Vineland* was his
first feminist book. The three female speakers wore black tops and pants
(the pants were still a little radical for the MLA at that time) in
emulation of the ninjettes of the novel. I remember sitting on the podium
and watching the room fill: 80 percent male, then 90 percent male … until
it became clear that despite having “feminism” in the title of the session,
the room was packed with the usual Pynchon men and maybe two or three other
women. Well and good, I thought: we were here to introduce women’s issues
into Pynchon studies, so we’d bring the guys into the big questions of
deceit and betrayal and sexual obsession and family and community in this
novel whose main characters were indisputably female. But the logic of the
science guys as usual prevailed. Every one of the (exclusively male)
questioners ignored all our points about gender and sexuality and instead
asked Kate Hayles about a passage in the novel distinguishing between
analogue and digital technologies.

While that session did little to disrupt the sense of Pynchon studies as a
boys’ club, *Vineland*does mark a change in Pynchon’s authorial attitude
toward women. I have argued in “Feminist Theory and the Politics of
*Vineland*” that it is not only a novel centering on three female
characters and influenced by certain feminist writings but also a novel
that imagines what it would be like to *be* Frenesi or DL and opens up that
space of identification to readers, providing a much different kind of
access to female characters than in most cases in the previous novels.2
<https://ugapress.manifoldapp.org/read/5b45e07c-5f85-477e-9297-38118346b3a9/section/b926c838-c835-4bac-a0bd-0b43cdb6e292#ch01note-2>
 These *Vineland*characters have a complex interiority and agency. In my
experience, female readers especially find them *interesting*—and in class
we sometimes air our suspicions that Pynchon himself found them more
interesting than most of his previous major female characters. Interiority
and agency are attributes that are muted in the depiction of such
“feminine” “good” women from the first three novels as Rachel Owlglass,
Paola Maijstraal, Oedipa Maas, Jessica Swanlake, and Leni Pökler. Lack of
agency is most obviously manifested as a lack of explicable motivation.
Despite their often central status as symbols and as functions moving the
plot along, these women display cognitive processes and desires that are
simple, self-evident, and wholly unlike the reasoning and desires of the
male characters, however flawed the latter are (and of course these male
flaws are dynamic and central to *V*.). Women, bless their alien little
natures, are just like that. My sense is that Pynchon has always done
better with women who are not wholly “good” in the novel’s own terms, which
in these cases seem to be the terms of a particularly midcentury masculine
fantasy. Only with *Gravity’s Rainbow* (1973), in characters like Katje
Borgesius and Greta Erdmann, neither of them nice or good or otherwise
idealized in the novel’s own terms, do I find more development of and space
for reader identification.


On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 5:27 AM peterthooper at juno.com <peterthooper at juno.com>
wrote:

> I apologize for not remembering the 2 who previously posted this utterly
> wonderful link, but there’s a temporarily free book, _Pynchon, Sex, and
> Gender_ online.
>
> https://ugapress.manifoldapp.org/projects/thomas-pynchon-sex-and-gender
>
> But and anyway, the 1st essay is by the redoubtable Molly Hite who likes
> Pynchon but calls him on some problematic areas.
>
> Wonderful essay.
>
> Small topic: there’s this footnote.
>
> “2. I don’t see Prairie as fully imagined, despite her centrality. Her
> two-dimensionality coexists with her passivity and her niceness, and to an
> extent both passivity and niceness are qualities limiting the possibilities
> for character development in the women Pynchon creates.”
>
>
> But Ms Hite, is she only passive and nice?
>
> You spend the better part of 14 years with Zoyd and see if you end up
> passive and nice. I think she’s competent and prickly.
>
> Item: at the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives she ruminates, “Earn what
> you eat, secure what you shit. Been doing it for years.”
>
> Is it possible that even superb readers miss an element of taunting that
> leaps out at me with her quip about their blood types when he’s actually
> present...
>
> and refuse to attribute to the possibility that he might “rilly” be her
> father her words, “You can take me anywhere you want?”
>
> Pynchon’s range includes teen lust (not that he specializes in it) and
> we’d see it if it were here. IMHO, it’s not.
>
> She’s multitasking emotionally:
> 1) obeying Zoyd’s much earlier, “keep ‘em legs together, teen bimbo!”
> 2) by turning away from Alexei, who’s gotta be more attractive than BV
> 3) pursuing a glimmer of hope that maybe Zoyd isn’t really her Dad - the
> guy is no prize!
> 4) whistling *after* passing the graveyard, minimizing the threat in her
> memory, telling herself she’s up for whatever
> 5) choosing a chaste night in a sleeping bag and being rewarded with a
> smooch from the family dog. It’s like a Hallmark movie!
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>