animals in M&D

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

I read Pynchon in part because I like ghosts and talking
animals, talking trees, talking clocks, and mechanical
ducks. I really dig his mechanical duck and I think  the
duck is a combination of a few of Pynchon's favorite things.

 Last night I watched a production of Hamlet on the Tube.
Shakespeare's plays are full supernatural things--witches,
magicians, fairies, ghosts, and so forth. Sometimes he
treats these supernaturals with amused tolerance and
sometimes with grave meditation. In Shakespeare, we find
Objective Ghosts--apparent to more than one person,like
Hamlet's father of Act I and Subjective ghosts-- figments of
one persons fancy,like Banquo in Macbeth.

In Pynchon we find animals and ghosts and so forth that are
in like manner, Object and Subjective. Shakespeare was a
dramatist and so we don't have narrators to complicate these
matters. We do have, and this is one point I'll address,
persons thinking out loud and sometimes Pynchon's
characters--human, animal, machine, combinations of these
--think out loud too. Note, I am deliberately avoiding the
traditional terms of drama and prose fiction and prefer to
look at examples from Pynchon's works.  

A Sea Gull, Alligators, a Community of Saintly Rats, three
dogs, a clock and a duck. 

In V., Benny Profane, a schlemiel and human yo-yo, can not
live in peace with inanimate objects, see V..31, Benny's
shower.  Benny searches the street level for something that
will make his own disassembly as plausible as any machine.
Profane is perplexed by Da Conho's love for a machine gun,
Rachel's love for her MG: "he had his first intelligence
that something had been going on under the rose, maybe for
longer and with more people than he would care to think
about." When he is struck by Rachel's car, he reflects on
the fact, that he was nearly killed by "another inanimate
object," though he isn't quite sure if it was "Rachel or the
car." He can not communicate with Rachel, her words-she
talks to her car-- are inanimate, and he wonders about his
compulsion to suicide: "It seemed sometimes that he put
himself deliberately in the way of hostile objects, as if he
were looking to get schlimazzeled out of existence."  He has
a recurring nightmare,  "that if he kept going down that
street, not only his ass but also his arms, legs, sponge
brain and clock of a heart must be left behind to litter the
pavement, be scattered among manhole covers."  Also see his
dream of the boy with the golden screw and his awakening
without a screwdriver V..34.   (note return of repressed,the
nocturnal nature of literature and luddite genre) Aboard a
destroyer Profane talks to a sea gull, "suppose I was God,"
and imagines that he can Zap a cattle car off a pier, hurl a
thunderbolt at an SP or cause Patsy Pagono to grow wings and
fly away. After failing to accomplish any of these fantastic
feats, he presumes that God's powers are charged with more
benevolent magic, and so he point a finger at Dewey Gland
and commands him to sing "that Algerian pacifist song," but
Dewey sings Blue Suede Shoes Elvis style instead. So much
for a schlemiel playing God with machines, humans, and
animals. The narrator (and it's important that the narrator
attributes these characteristics to the gull, for in a way,
like ghosts in Pynchon or Shakespeare for that matter, we
have Objective and Subjective "supernaturals") tells us that
the  sea gull simply blinks, shrugs, is bored, and ignores
the schlemiel.  

Profane decides to go under the street to hunt alligators,
and the narrator says, "Profane talks to alligators."  But
does Profane talk to the alligators and do they talk back? 
Under the street,Profane hunts alligators through the holy
waters of Father
Fairing's Parish. Father Fairing talks to rats. The Rats are
not like the sea gull that ignores Benny on the ship. They
are not like the alligator that he thinks might be "lazy, or
old or stupid" or "tired of living" and which he is "so
sorry to shoot," -Stencil is shot in the ass-for these are
not ordinary Rats, these are Saints that argue Religion,
History, and Philosophy. 


Profane, and  not the narrator, attributes human
characteristics to the 
alligator. He sees the alligator as old, lazy, stupid, tired
of living, coy, a
little sad. He wonders, " is it saying anything to me?" He
is sentimental and superstitious and before shooting at it,
he thinks, "Surely the alligator would receive the gift of
tongues." At the end of the chapter, Stencil, with shot gun
pellets in his left buttocks, shifts his old, creaky, middle
aged, wrinkled body into Fu's Plymouth, feeling like "the
alter kocker (Yiddish-"Old Fart") Rachel may have thought he
was." 

TBC

TF