BE Reread.

[Joseph Tracy]

  Seeing the light, walking through the dark 
Maxine is both deeply maternal ( protective, forgiving, including, warning), and (up-to-a-point) fearlessly interested in confronting injustice and deciding for herself where the lines will be. When she abandons her fraud examiner certification she embraces her inner anarchist, decides to trust her own judgement. Meanwhile she continues to set picks for her sons, make a safe space for her struggling and sometimes prickly employee and for  her friend who betrayed her.
   There is a tension between these 2 poles which appears throughout the novel. In some ways these are novelist traits. You create characters and  want them to be real and credible, you ‘investigate’ them, tell their story, expose them, but also you care about them even if they do something or  represent something you find despicable or shallow or hypocritical. Do they want to change, to let in enough light to behave more in accord with that light, that perception of the possibility of a better, kinder way to be? Also the needed changes are not just internal. How much can we change what we find in the world and how much can we change what we are? In Pynchon’s novels and in my own experience people can change, often with an upward tilt,  and history tells us that systems and social values can change but it tends to be slower than the span of any individual life, and goes against tremendous forces.  Empires, corporations,  plutocrats, parties all accumulate power, set patterns of myth and economic power in motion, and gain momentum.   

Pynchon is a writer who sees the world through a vast body of information, more history, more physics, more geography, more artistic intellectual and  physical culture  than most can hold in their minds. It floods into his stories with wacky abandon and masterful control, often the weirdest parts are just bits from history.  He sees both the big picture and the little pictures with a similar disposition to what we find in Maxine, finding and identifying meaningful patterns, joking, amused, resilient,  occasionally appalled, endlessly curious, keeping cool as a noir detective, but caring as a mom.So where is Maxine/Pynchon headed in Bleeding Edge.
  
There is a pattern in Thomas Pynchon’s writing that repeats. We follow an open minded protagonist on his or her journey and somewhere along the line this hero/schlemiel takes a turn into the underworld, the minotaur's maze, the inner workings of the world machine. The question becomes how far will they go, what will they find, is there a way out, perhaps another turn that could have led somplace cheerier, perhaps an overworld? The difficulty for the reader and the protagonist  seems to be that we don’t know whether this underworld is external or internal or perhaps both; is it the subconscious, paranoid delusion, a  real hallway in the halls of power, a mythical nexus of worlds ?  It is surely real, death is always here, the ultimate wake-up call, death wielded by power .  At this point there will be murder, or attemped murder, usually both because that is the modus operendi of the criminal, the state, every entity that relies on violence for control and survival when confronted with an uncooperative intruder or potential whistleblower. I would propose that herein lies Pychon’s sympathy with anarchism, where he sees all monopolies on violence must lead.  His writing questions that necessity, that degradation of our imagination, that relinquishing of our power. 

Power imbalances are unstable. For a marriage to hold on to love both parties must be respected, must be real and listening, must embrace the divisions of responsibility, the needed flexibility. By the end of the novel Maxine and Horst have both grown in this direction. It’s easy to make babies, not so easy to make a home.  I see Heidi as someone who has only found second hand ideas of home/love/inner stability/personal satisfaction. Maxine seems to be her home. Through the course of the book she goes from a dispensible marriage proposal  to an affair with her best friend’s husband, to a married Cop who soon finds fresh interests, and finally to a man who seems more intersted in Hitler's cologne than her. She is trapped in an internalized princess story and for some reason the prince isn’t showing up.  The princess is an inherently temporary role, a role that must be transended or become unappealing. And it is an invitation to trouble when the prince turns out to be an abuser, which happens with at least one male ‘princess' in the novel.   
 
I don’t want to be a sales person for marriage. It’s a dicy proposition and not for all.  I think intimacy, friendship, love, companionship, and communion of pleasure, heart and spirit and  can take other forms.   Honesty and realism  and a good dose of anarchism can keep us from a lot of heartache.