LISS/STEPVR next VL reference in _Pynchon, Sex, and Gender_

[peterthooper at juno.com]

https://ugapress.manifoldapp.org/read/thomas-pynchon-sex-and-gender/section/3169cf47-90ee-420c-a2ca-d71ee75704e0#ch05

this essay, by Doug Haynes, is entitled "Allons enfants," which becomes "a lawn savant" in VL - and it's really spectacular.

two brief passages inspire my small and not-so-salty topic, although there is a lot more in the article.

"For Pynchon, cheap literary thrills are not confined to any one genre. He imagines them rather as an affective field, or a collective social imaginary, with a residue of religion sometimes appearing as “the miraculous” (“Is It OK?” par. 18), aligning with what Susan Sontag says of pornography in “The Pornographic Imagination” (1967): that it “aims to ‘excite’ in the same way that books which render an extreme form of religious experience aim to ‘convert’” (95)."


and yet , what my experience reading VL et al is more like than cheap thrills, is this quote (which Mr Haynes builds on, with the other, quite effectively and with a sweeping purport completely outside the scope of my small topic, but which I learned from)

"To exist affectively within any historical formation is, as Gilles Deleuze describes it, to be in “a state of passional suspension in which [the body] exists more outside of itself, more in the abstracted action of the impinging thing and the abstracted context of that action, than within itself” (31). "


my underwhelming small topic, is that there is abso-tooteley nothing porn-like about reading Pynchon. 

I don't think that's just me. Maybe it is, but I don't think so.  

He mentions all kinds of stuff, but never panders.

There's a good feeling of "exist[ing] affectively within a historical [in this case fictional] formation" which is exciting, but not that way.