Crying of Lot 49, Group Read 2024

[J K Van Nort]

My problem with the sex, especially after Oed initiates it by kissing him awake, is that he undresses her while she sleeps, or at least falls in and out of sleep. I wouldn’t keep undressing a woman that I just met when she has passed out, and I hope most men wouldn’t try to have sex with her when she’s asleep.
Part of this is also a young Pynchon writing about sex. This whole scene doesn’t feel authentic. Metzger is passed out in his underwear. She is drunk and notices his aging belly. She really then suddenly wants to jump him? A man she had already identified as possibly putting a con on her. 
This whole scene is hard to take. Is it necessary to move the plot forward? The maturing of his sex episodes in GR show a quantitative leap forward from this.



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On Wednesday, May 15, 2024, 15:29, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

Speaking again of sex, Oedipa and Metzger,
when I wrote about bad sex--not fully conscious, engaged, loving
Lawrentian sex--there is the countertruth (if I am right)...that

They came together, satisfyingly.

The need? The meaning?

Oedipa's bite, thru the sharkskin suit into M's arm? Not normal. WTF?
And I was led to these words in Margaret Atwood's early poetic
narrative *The Journals of Susannah Moodie. *A Canadian woman
on the prairie, struggling, in the mid-nineteenth century.

 "you dangle on the leash of your own longing; your need grows teeth."

No, no influence on Pynchon, maybe the reverse?  1970
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