Postmodern Erotica

BY: PROVOKR Staff

Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern masterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow, was on track to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1974 when the organization’s board of trustees got squeamish about allowing such a provocative novel—one that features plentiful scenes of explicit sexuality—to earn their stamp of approval. The novel’s main character, Tyrone Slothrop, is a G.I. in World War II Europe and an inveterate ladies man who indulges in lots of sexual escapades. Here’s a titillating passage from Rainbow that recounts one of Slothrop’s bedroom conquests.

Knowing what is expected of her, she waits with a vapid look till he’s done, mellow close-harmony reeds humming a moment in the air, then reaches out a hand, melting toward him as he topples in slow-motion toward her mouth, feathers sliding, sleeves furling, ascending bare arms finely moongrained slipping around and up his back, her tacky tongue nervous as a moth, his hands rasping over sequins… then her breasts flatten against him as her forearms and hands go away folding up behind her to find a zipper, bring it snarling down her spineline…

Katie’s skin is whiter than the white garment she rises from. Born again… out the window he can almost see the spot where the devilfish crawled in from the rocks. She walks like a ballerina on her toes, thighs long and curving, Slothrop undoing belt, buttons, shoelaces hopping one foot at a time, oboy oboy, but the moonlight only whitens her back, and there is still a dark side, her ventral side, her face, that he can no longer see, a terrible beastlike change coming over muzzle and lower jaw, black pupils growing to cover the entire eye space till whites are gone and there’s only the red animal reflection when the light comes to strike no telling when the light–

She has sunk to the deep bed, pulling him along, into down, satin, seraphic and floral embroidery, turning immediately to take his erection into her stretched fork, into a single vibration on which the night is tuning… as they fuck she quakes, body strobing miles beneath him in cream and night-blue, all sound suppressed, eyes in crescents behind the gold lashes, jet earrings, long, octahedral, flying without a sound, beating against her cheeks, black sleet, his face above her unmoved, full of careful technique-is it for her? or wired into the Slothropian Run-together they briefed her on-she will move him, she will not be mounted by a plastic shell… her breathing has grown more hoarse, over a threshold into sound… thinking she might be close to coming he reaches a hand into her hair, tries to still her head, needing to see her face: this is suddenly a struggle, vicious and real—she will not surrender her face—and out of nowhere she does begin to come, and so does Slothrop.

For some reason now, she who never laughs has become the top surface of a deep, rising balloon of laughter. Later as she’s about to go to sleep, she will also whisper, “Laughing,” laughing again.