Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

174
ROBERT E. KOHN
himself passing “through Iceland spar” and “being divided in two,” is
starting to worry about himself (Against 688).
Kitsch, which is garish art or text generally considered to be in bad
taste, has long been postmodernism’s in-your-face response to
modernity’s intellectual elitism. The idiosyncratic Pynchon takes
kitsch well over the top when Reef, thinking that there was something
“flirtatious” going on between Mouffette and himself, gets an erection
and invites her to jump on his lap:
“Oboy, oboy.” He stroked the diminutive spaniel for a while until, with no
warning, she jumped off the couch and slowly went into the bedroom,
looking back now and then over her shoulder. Reef followed, taking out his
penis, breathing heavily through his mouth. “Here, Mouffie, nice big dog bone
for you right here, lookit this, yeah, seen many of these lately? come on,
smells good don’t it, mmm, yum!” and so forth, Mouffette […], sniffing with
curiosity. “That’s right, now, o-o-open up … good girl, good Mouffette now
let’s just put this—yaahhgghh!” Reader, she bit him. (Against 666)
The grammatically incorrect “smells good don’t it,” in which the
“don’t” could be facetiously taken as a contraction of “donut,” is
reminiscent of the human jelly-doughnut, similarly(?) bitten only 40pages
earlier in the novel. But we must be careful of what Pynchon
masquerades as kitsch; Reef’s sexual interaction with Mouffie, especially
with its implication of a bedroom invitation by the dog, invokes
Virilio’s concerns about “new relationships between species” and “the
loaded terms of bestiality” (61). Virilio not only adds his anxiety to those
of Toffler and Birardi about the “general speeding-up of phenomena
in our hypermodern world,” but is alarmed that “geneticists are now
using cloning in the quest for the chimera, the hybridization of man
and animal” (51). Virilio’s paranoia over “that great transgenic art in
which every pharmacy, every laboratory will launch its own ‘lifestyles,’
its own transhuman fashions” (61) seems over the top, but it
resonates ominously in Kelleter’s fear of “the adaptive capacities of
high intelligence […] turning evolution into history” (227). If eugenics
doesn’t do it, consider Peter Swirsky’s prediction about a “thinking
computer” that “will build itself by modifying its rulebook, erasing