Little Orphan Benny

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

Jimmy writes:

> Well, silly ole literal-minded me.  Duh!  But now I'm puzzled about the
> metaphoric meaning.  If we forget about Benny's actual Catholic/Jewish
> folks and ask about his spiritual parents, we come to The Street.  While
> The Street may not provide a warm and fuzzy family constellation--it's
> probably more like ToughLove--that's not the same thing as being orphaned.
> The Street is still very much alive in his consciousness, and in the novel.
> Benny may be passive and unambitious, but that hardly makes him an orphan.
> 
> I must be missing something.  What did you mean?

[I apologize for my belated answer to Jimmy. I was just finishing the
message below yesterday, when the Oulu server went down in its turn.] 


I mean that Pynchon largely omits the family until Vineland.
Fathers and mothers being absent, with the exception of "The Secret
Integration." Where filial lines are of importance in early Pynchon, 
they are shown to be terrifying. Oedipa gets orphanized in _Lot 49_,
and only in this way it is even *possible* for her to find alternative, 
nonfilial lines of (dis)inheritance. The characters don't usually have
children, the main characters almost never, with the exception of Leni
and Poekler or Greta, and what do we have here. Slothrop is an orphan 
in the sense he apparently has early been given to Mr Jamf. Stencil is
literally an orphan, and quite a peculiar orphan as it were. Of course,
the Street obviously forms some kind of community. But Profane may be 
said to be an orphan also in the sense that he somehow has no history.
Melville saw Americans as orphans. This can be noticed everywhere in
_Moby-Dick_. But Ishmael has at least the Enlightenment urge to
encyclopedize and thus situate himself in the history of whaling, which to
him largely means the history of progress, and what is more, American
progress, which makes some sort of a home for him until the bitter end.
When one orphan is rescued from the sea. In _V._ Hothouse and Street,
Stencil and Profane, pa-ia and en-py, make distinct opposites. In Oedipa
and Slothrop, respectively, the opposed character pair of "Entropy"  and
_V._ have melted together. Oedipa gets into an oscillation between pa-ia
and en-py. But it is not until GR that the opposition of Hothouse and
Street is explicitly trangressed, in what is called the Zone. It subverts
the opposition of obsessively closed solipsistic interiors and exteriors
of mindless pleasures and terrors. In this transgression a new magic is
born in the process, which to certain extent may be said to caress the
dwellers of the Zone. These children of the Zone are, consequently, less
orphan that the children of the Street, since it is the division between
interiority and exteriority, which produces "proper" children of private
Hegelian family units and "public" children, orphans. This said, from
_Vineland_ on Pynchon has started to find possibilities in the family,
hasn't he. Possibilities where the definition of family wouldn't be based
on orphanizing exclusions; more porous families. Hopefully _M&D_ does this
more convincingly than _V-d_. I've been in such a rush that I've only read
150 pages.

Heikki