LISS/STEPVR 5th roundup 27/19 Aprl 17th

[Michael Bailey]

Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2020 03:20:03 +0000
From: Raphael Saltwood <PlainMrBotanyB at outlook.com>

...could you put something else instead of a defenestration?
...it compares with Groundhog Day

----- if you were writing the book and not just reading it.
      Vineland's claims of progress for Zoyd are a little more modest imho
than GHD's for Phil Connors.




Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2020 22:37:28 -0500
From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>

I think most people here don't need me to elaborate.
Frenesi betrays her most trusted friends and family for Brock Vond. That
seems to me the most important turn of events in VL.
At the end, DL spreads her legs up into the night sky asking for Brock to
come take her.
Both episodes are unexpected and dramatic. And ugly.

----- DL mistakes Takeshi for BV, in Tokyo, & does the deed with him,
true.  Prairie OTOH keeps her legs together pretty much, imho, but
interpretations vary & de gustibus etc.



Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2020 23:51:08 -0400
From: Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com>

It says a lot about Pynchon

----- such as? Do you hold with David's views?




Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2020 23:52:51 -0500
From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>

It says a lot bad about VL. Unlike homophobic scenes in GR, this isn't
satire. It is a serious portrayal. It is the heart of VL. It is a polemc of
sexual dynamics. Pynhon seems to like his female characters liking abuse.
It happens in Bleeding Edge also. In GR it is his S&M daisy chain. It is a
polemic about power dynamics. That's why I earlier said Pynchon writes
equations (of power dynamics) instead of narratives about characters.

- does this place him with others such as de Sade, or didn't Derrida turn
to S&M in his later years?



Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2020 05:12:04 GMT
From: "peterthooper at juno.com"

That autumn '98 Vineland read musta been dope

----- high traffic. Some interesting posts, i'm'a look at it some more.





Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2020 04:02:18 -0400
From: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>

It is essential to the depth of his vision. Because we can characterize it
as so humanly "ugly" which it is, shows that Pynchonn sees it in our world.
Which it is. Everywhere.

There cannot be a sadistically driven world of men in power without SOME
women (and the rest of we men) accepting it, even liking it when you see
them with his N.O. Brownian depth.

All his characters are not "round" and natural ones as we have long stated.
Both many men and many women embody in themselves, in actions within the
book, his ideas in many many ways, his vision.

It is NOT the case that Pynchon "likes his female characters liking
abuse"...Many, many who do not....the generalization does not apply.

----- any examples? a lot of them certainly do take some abuse, as do the
male characters for that matter.




Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2020 04:50:45 -0400
From: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>

After coffee, this approach came to me. This is like dissing V because of
the very ugly scene with her.
It is so deeply thematic, his vision of what has happened to.........Venus,
women, "the feminine" in history.
the "soft bowels" of women as Shakespeare says of those who carry our
behind-power-dynamics selves.

-----where does he say that? I've heard the phrase "bowels of compassion",
also "pricked in the reins" (meaning the conscience is in the kidneys?)




Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2020 05:53:52 -0400
From: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>

>From the good Molly Hite from this book. And a personal anecdote. I
recently unearthed my first copy of V, the (former) Modern library editon.
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 bourgeouis boy, and even stpider than
I am now, I thought I was supposed to identify almost fully with The Whole
Sick Crew.

(Hite)
"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 Poekler. 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.

----- thanks, yes, this is a marvelous essay!
Stopping reading when one disapproves is something I still do, you can
always go back later but you can't unread ...