Against the Day, Chapter Eleven: The Attack of the Performative Sexuality!

So we start with more of this political...stuff. We are informed that "Vlado had been [Cyprian's] one dependable operative, as much as possible in this game his friend" (866), and...wait, what? His friend? Did we ever even see them meet? I've gotta say, Pynch, as big a fan as I am, all of this Great Game spycraft stuff seems decidedly half-baked.

He meets with various people, including his ol' pal Ratty (married now) and the Prince and Princess Spongiatosta. Everyone's thinking about how best to take out Theign, and try as I might, I cannot even begin to understand Theign's arc or why everyone hates him now. Once again, I just don't think Pynchon does a good job with this.

But, well, if you hate him as you're supposed to, we have...good?...news here, as he dies extremely unpleasantly. Is this torture porn?

Rusted pulleys and driveshafts with broken leather belts drooping from them ran everywhere overhead. The floor was stained black from campfires built by transient visitors. On a metal shelf were various instruments, including a gimlet, a butcher's saw, and Zlatko's 11mm Montengrin Gasser, should a quick end become necessary. . . . They took out his right eye with a woodworker's gouge. They showed him the eye before tossing it to the rats who waited in the shadows. . . . "One eye was missing from Vlado's corpse," Zlatko said. "We shall take both of yours. . . . Soon the pain had driven Theign into articulated screaming, as if toward some rhapsodic formula that might deliver him. Zlatko stood by the shelf of tools, impatient with his brother's philosophical approach. He would have used the pistol straight off, and spent the rest of the evening in a bar. (874)

So that's horrible, and I have no idea what I'm meant to get out of it. Am I meant to find it edifying? I don't. I just find it really gross. And now this storyline is over, and...? Blah.

Well, the chapter improves from there, as we get into the Yashmeen/Reef/Cyprian triangle. Funny thing: I actually wrote about this for my doctoral dissertation, as an example of utopia. But now, going back to it, I think, huh. This is MUCH shorter than I remember. I don't think what I wrote was wrong, exactly, but there's much less of it, and I was probably exaggerating its importance. I suppose it's not a bad thing--admit it!--that I'm pretty sure none of the professors on my committee had actually read the book. No need to answer any inconvenient questions.

My main thesis here was that these characters create a kind of mini-utopia within the not-so-great outside world, and that this runs on the Judith Butler idea of your sexual identity being a thing you do rather than a thing you are: constructed of a series of acts, subject to disruption. We've already seen how Cyprian's identity is sort of mutable--he's basically gay, but then, Yashmeen! But it's kind of more surprising with Reef, who seems very straightforward ("his idea of romance begins and ends with me on my back") notwithstanding that weird thing with the dog that we saw a while back.

Well, but let's back up. Cyprian and Yashmeen meet again. He's jealous of Reef, and we get this sort of sadomasochistic play that's simultaneously real and not. "Of course Reef and I have been fucking, we fuck whenever we can find a moment, we are lovers, Cyprian, in all the ways you were never permitted" (875). It seems like cruelty, but it's more flirtation, really.

More about Cyprian and this kind of elusive desirelessness:

Most who met him found it difficult to reconcile his appetite for sexual abasement--its specific carnality--with what had to be termed a religious surrender of the self. Then Yashmeen entered the picture, had a look, and understood in a pulsebeat, in the simple elegant turn of a wrist, what she was looking at. (876)

Well, I wish she could explain it to me, because I'm still kind of in the dark.

Reef and Cyprian aren't the only ones who are finding their identities challenged:

For years Yashmeen had been the one obliged to put up with passions directed at her by others, settling for moments of amusement, preferring like a spectator at a conjuring performance not to know too much about how it worked. Heaven knew she had tried to be a good sport. But sooner or later she would run out of patience. A certain exasperated sigh and another broken-hearted amateur was left to flounder in the erotic swamp. But now, for the first time, with Cyprian's return, something was different, as if with his miraculous resurrection something had also been restored to her, though she resisted naming it. (877)

Ever flounder in an erotic swamp before? It's an experience, let me tell you. What it amounts to:

It was going on behind every other window one could see, common as stars in the sky, the reversals of power, wives over husbands, pupils over masters, troopers over generals, wogs over whites, the old expected order of things all on its head, a revolution in terms of desire, and yet, at Yashmeen's feet, that seemed only the outskirts--the obvious or sacramental form of the thing.... (878)

Clearly, this isn't just about sex--although it is very, very much about sex. "What was there for you to doubt? I have loved women, as you have loved men...and what of it? We can do whatever we can imagine. Are we not the world to come? Rules of proper conduct are for the dying, not for us" (879).

There is a masked ball--un ballo in maschera--at the Spongiatosta residence. Here we get the first sexual encounter between the three of them, and boy oh boy. Literary fiction doesn't get much pornier than this. I...don't think I need to give a blow-by-blow (although they certainly do); at the end, incongruously, Pynchon writes "but here let us reluctantly leave them." Oh, HERE is where you chose to do that? Yeesh.

Anyway, now they're together. This erotic idyll, wandering through Italy. Some clumsy yet amusing sitcom-y stuff about Reef's bad cooking. But the world still goes on: they run into Reef's ol' pal Wolfe Tone O'Rooney, who opines that "governments are about to fuck things up for everybody, make life more unlivable than brother Bakunin ever imagined" (890). Things, it is sensed, may be changing or coming to an end. But we DO get this gorgeous passage:

One day at Biarritz, drifting in the streets, she heard accordion music from an open doorway. A curious certainty took hold of her, and she looked in. It was a bal musette, nearly empty at that time of day, except for one or two dedicated wine-drinkers and the accordionist, who was playing a sweetly minor-key street waltz. Light came in at some extremely oblique angle to reveal Reef and Cyprian formally in each other's arms, stepping in rhythm to the music. Reef was teaching Cyprian to dance. Yashmeen thought about making herself known but immediately decided against it. (891)

Seriously, be still my beating heart. Thus ends the chapter, more or less. I'll admit I've glided over a lot of stuff here--maybe impatience with a section I've already examined in great detail--but you might as well read it yourself if you're interested.