Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender

Ali Chetwynd, Joanna Freer, Georgios Maragos

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780820353999
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Thomas Pynchon's fiction has been considered masculinist, misogynist, phallocentric, and pornographic: its formal experimentation, irony, and ambiguity have been taken both to complicate such judgments and to be parts of the problem. To the present day, deep critical divisions persist as to whether Pynchon's representations of women are sexist, feminist, or reflective of a more general misanthropy, whether his writing of sex is boorishly pornographic or effectually transgressive, whether queer identities are celebrated or mocked, and whether his departures from realist convention express masculinist elitism or critique the gendering of genre.

Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender reframes these debates. As the first book-length investigation of Pynchon's writing to put the topics of sex and gender at its core, it moves beyond binary debates about whether to see Pynchon as liberatory or conservative, instead examining how his preoccupation with sex and gender conditions his fiction's whole worldview. The essays it contains, which cumulatively address all of Pynchon's novels from V. (1963) to Bleeding Edge (2013), investigate such topics as the imbrication of gender and power, sexual abuse and the writing of sex, the gendering of violence, and the shifting representation of the family. Providing a wealth of new approaches to the centrality of sex and gender in Pynchon's work, the collection opens up new avenues for Pynchon studies as a whole.

SECTION 1 Origins

When Pynchon Was a Boys’ Club

V. and Midcentury Mystifications of Gender

MOLLY HITE

Pynchon in the Academy

In 1982, my first year as a faculty member at Cornell, I taught a course called “The Postwar American Novel.” By the middle of the semester I realized I was in trouble, not because I had chosen as many books written by women as by men (such audacity was fairly new in the Cornell English Department, which specialized in radical literary theory coupled with unquestioned adherence to a roster of books called “the canon”), but because the women in the class were furious at the books by men. My choices were quite ordinary—Kerouac, Ellison, Roth, Bellow, and Pynchon’s V. But the women were enraged by the sexism in these novels, something I had taken as a matter of course.

My initial inclination was to say, “Of course they’re sexist, these are the fifties and sixties, what did you expect?” But the overt misogyny of only a few decades earlier was a huge shock to these young women. They did not see gender discrimination, ridicule, and paranoia as historical phenomena to acknowledge and note studiously; they saw the attitudes toward women in these novels as impinging on them—and of course they were right. I had to face up to the fact that books I had loved and written about were in many respects impossible for these young women to absorb. And their resistance made the sexism of a whole society more visible to me. I grew up during the period I was teaching, after all, and despite my later participation in the feminist movement, on several different levels I was still used to the discriminatory ideologies that penetrated even the most serious literary fiction during the postwar period. Ironically for me, the novel my female students seemed to hate most was my favorite, V. (1963). I had to acknowledge that Pynchon too was a product of his era, an era that in many respects he represented satirically but without seriously questioning norms of gender identity and behavior.¹

At the same time, I was beginning to contend with the enormous gender imbalance among Pynchon critics. At the science and literature and MLA panels on Pynchon, women were used to being a tiny minority. Usually there would be five or so of us in a packed conference room (Pynchon studies was a hot item from the beginning) and forty or fifty men. The panels were almost entirely made up of men. Pynchon Notes was edited by men and might have one contribution by a woman every other issue or so. Collections of critical essays contained mostly articles by men. Women who were writing and publishing about Pynchon also had the experience of being overlooked even after our work was published and had received excellent reviews. I remember having an epistolary argument with a Pynchon Notes editor in the 1980s about a list he had drawn up of the best essays on Pynchon to date. None, of course, were by women.

My anecdotes aren’t unusual or even particularly outrageous. At that stage in academic history women were always being passed over, not because our male colleagues were working consciously to keep us out of prevailing discourses but because we were underrepresented among literary faculty and they honestly could not see us. Among Pynchon critics the situation was extreme. Pynchon was widely conceded to be a “guys’ writer,” first because he used scientific metaphors, and science was widely understood to be a “guy thing”; second because his scope was world-historical rather than romantic and/or domestic, which is what most twentieth-century scholars at that point saw as the concerns of the “women’s novel”; third because there was a lot of increasingly kinky sex in Pynchon’s novels, and it was considered inappropriate for female critics to write or, worse, talk about such matters; and fourth, especially in the case of V., because for all its subtlety and irony Pynchon’s writing itself represented without any trace of self-awareness these same trivializing and effacing tendencies—a point to which I return.

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 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.

Gender at Midcentury

I do not know whether the change in Pynchon’s representation of female characters led to more female critics contributing to Pynchon studies. I do know that Vineland was the first of Pynchon’s novels that I had no trouble teaching to young women, both undergraduates and graduates. I could say that the novels Pynchon published after 1990 had many elements of feminist awareness in them, but it would be more accurate to say that from Vineland on there is a dwindling of a prefeminist attitude from the postwar period when Pynchon was coming to maturity and, not incidentally, beginning work on V. It is important to remember that during that time, and in fact up into the 1970s, there was no feminism in general public discourse. I mean not only that very few people, most of us women, read and talked about the theorizations of gender inequality that were coming out of the various second-wave feminist movements but also that we lacked the language for the kinds of subordination, condescension, and violation that we experienced on a daily basis. For instance, widespread use of the word “sexism” to refer to discrimination against women dates to only the late 1960s. In the misogynist culture of the 1950s and 1960s any objection to gender norms was interpreted as personal and pathological. With our current acknowledgment of transsexual rights and gender fluidity it is hard to explain why being told you “wanted a penis” was a stunning putdown, but part of the widespread misogyny, which was also an extreme and dangerous homophobia (another word that did not exist), involved a paranoid policing of gender and sexual boundaries.³

In this atmosphere of suspicion and defensiveness about what men and women are, do and want, Thomas Pynchon was writing his extraordinary first novel V. The style and structure of V. are so sophisticated, authoritative, and daring that as critics we can easily assume that Pynchon emerged into the public gaze fully formed, with exactly the same sensibility that we find in Vineland or Bleeding Edge (2013), to pick the two most obvious female-centered examples.⁴ But in his first book the author inevitably reproduced at least some of the values of his contemporary society.

If V. itself seems fully mature, the letters and drafts of this novel now in the Harry Ransom Center reveal a young man shaped by his time and place: sometimes callow, sometimes pretentious, sometimes engaged in projects with frat-boy sensibilities (we see those in his undergraduate story “Mortality and Mercy in Vienna,” which features recently graduated partiers who speak and act in ways foreshadowing V.’s Whole Sick Crew), often referring reverently to former professors (white, male) and, most endearingly, given to elaborately constructed puns. Because Pynchon’s first novel comes out of this frame of mind and historical period—out of the writer’s youth and also the strange Cold War culture of the United States—it is a fascinating site for tracking prevailing ideologies of gender.

With its haunting quest theme and satiric evocations of New York bohemian life in the 1950s, V. was an instant success in U.S. high culture, reviewed as “a brilliant and turbulent first novel” in the New York Times Book Review and predicted to be “one of the very best works of the century” by the Atlantic Review.⁵ But for all its originality, the novel also reproduced some of the most extreme attitudes of a time in which gender politics were so emotionally fraught and passionately promoted that they seemed to be part of a metaphysics in which qualities attributed to men and women were eternal and innate, if often self-contradictory. Differences between men and women, in high culture fiction in particular, were regarded as both self-evident and mysterious. A similar mysteriousness permeated literary ideas about homosexuality and race.⁶

The central source of mystery was supposed to be women. Cold War literary culture took very seriously Freud’s famous observation that “the great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’” (421).⁷ V. of course is a novel about a mysterious woman whose avatars appear at key historical moments in the late nineteenth century and twentieth century. Her association with the archaic, powerful, and enigmatic goddesses chronicled by early twentieth-century popularizers of a new discipline, anthropology, is noted as a scholarly quest in V. (“in the tradition of [James Frazer’s] The Golden Bough or [Robert Graves’s] The White Goddess” [59]).⁸ In V., this mythic woman is more a force than a rational actor, personifying and desiring a historical movement toward decadence, the inanimate, and violence rather than being its cause. She is also identified with femininity. For instance, one character presented as a possible manifestation of V., Victoria Wren, appears to see herself as “embodying a feminine principle, acting as a complement to all this bursting, explosive male energy. Inviolate and calm, she watched the spasms of wounded bodies, the fair of violent death, framed and staged, it seemed, for her alone in that tiny square” (224). This still-familiar representation of the feminine is most important, and most mysterious, because she is conceived as the necessary complement to mysterious masculinity, with its “bursting, explosive male energy.” Enigmatically passive, Victoria observes “the fair of violent death” as if it were “framed and staged […] for her alone.” A long tradition of gender theorizing mystifies women in this way, treating silence and passivity as the complement of male violence and in many respects its enabler. This V.’s presence is implicitly damaging to men, although by the logic of the plot it is impossible to specify how, exactly, she is the agent of their destruction.

I come back to the mysterious aspect of female gendering and Pynchon’s brilliant use of this trope in V. I want to look first, however, at one of the ways another celebrated midcentury writer mystified not only femininity but masculinity, and not only in his fiction but in the interest of describing the overwhelming superiority of male writers. In his 1959 collection of short writings Advertisements for Myself Norman Mailer announced, “I have a terrible confession to make. I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today.” He went on—“I can only say that the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn. […] [T]his verdict may be taken fairly as the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those readers who do not share with me the ground of departure—that a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls” (472).

Mailer’s catalogue of the qualities of women’s writing is deliberately over the top, with vividly metaphoric descriptions emphasizing infantilism and triviality, sexual dysfunction or aberration, outdatedness or trendiness, psychic disability or perversity (“dykily psychotic”), cosmetic enhancement, and—tucked into a more general disparagement of preciosity—the failure to be Jewish (“Quaintsy Goysy”). Despite the exuberant hyperbole, however, Mailer is in no way parodying himself or a culture of extreme misogyny. In particular, he is not quite offering a metaphor when he concludes that “a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.” “Remnant” alludes to a truism of midcentury America that women’s goal in life is to castrate men. For Mailer, balls—even if badly mutilated by women—are necessary to be a “good novelist.”

Pynchon came of age, then, at a time when women were not simply mythologized as constraining, conservative forces pitted against the freedom, adventurousness and irreverence of men (in the long American tradition of Huck Finn escaping Aunt Sally and lighting out for the territories) but were often represented as actively malevolent powers. Further, both male ability and female inconsequence or hostility were conceived in terms of sexual body parts and functions. So in V. we find the counterpart to Mailer’s male novelist with his necessary testicles in the “authoress” whose own novels are associated by simile with menstrual blood: “His wife was an authoress. Her novels—three to date—ran a thousand pages each and like sanitary napkins had gathered an immense and faithful sisterhood of consumers. There’d even evolved somehow a kind of sodality or fan club that sat around, read from her books and discussed her Theory” (131). The self-evident insignificance of this writer’s novels and “Theory” (the capitalization indicates pretentiousness) is gestured at by words like the disparaging “authoress,” the ironically elevated “sodality” (religious fellowship) contrasted with the low-culture trivialization “fan club” to characterize her readers, and most of all by the phrase “like sanitary napkins” to characterize the quality of her books. Exclusively female, her readership is further degraded by its association with waste of the female reproductive system.

The “authoress,” named, in a characteristic Pynchon flourish, Mafia Winsome, is not only a mediocre practitioner of Pynchon’s own craft but embodies the entrapment that in mid-twentieth-century mythology makes even the common woman a menace. In an interchange with Benny Profane she emerges as sexually dangerous to men because she is a constraining and—even more threatening—containing force: “A woman wants to feel like a woman,” Mafia s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• A Chronological Bibliography of Relevant Published Research to 2017
• Section 1. Origins
• Section 2. Gender Roles
• Section 3. Sex Writing
• Section 4. Violence: Gendered and Sexualized
• Section 5. Family/Values
• Contributors
• Index