Manson chicks and microskirted cuties: pornification in Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice

Abstract

Many sexual encounters in Thomas Pynchon's fiction have occurred beyond the mainstream, generating theatres of perversity which dramatise the death wish and enact power relations from wider arenas. However, in Inherent Vice they change in nature. With the exception of scenes which use Charles Manson to fuel fantasies of domination and submission, they have lost their transgressive bite. Instead, the sheer profusion of variations, and the insouciance with which they are greeted, evinces the influence of a sexualised mainstream colonised by hardcore pornography. Paradoxically, much hardcore catering to the mass market is appreciably less transgressive than Pynchon's fiction has been. The narrative of his seventh novel, with its noir conventions and accompanying sexual motivation, is driven by the commissions his detective protagonist receives from femmes fatales and damsels in distress. The transference of these women from man to man becomes the novel's sexual currency.