V.V.(4) under the conscious force

[Terrance]

It's so difficult to discuss any of this without the freedom
to select passages from the rest of the novel. Obviously, at
this point  we cannot say that much about Stencil as
character, as quick change artist without going deeper into
the book.  Certainly the dossier recalls Slothrop's role
playing, the forcible dislocation,  the
poetic license, imaginative anxiety, Melville's Confidence
Man. Certainly the Mother/Father theme, individualism,
disguise, multiplicity, characterization, the fox, again
Confidence Man, is a constant in Pynchon's fiction. Stencil
is raised motherless, his Mother is dead or assumed to be
dead, maybe ran off or took her own life, but in any event,
is  gone, never his mother, leaving only the emptiness, the
blank, she is not in any of the correspondences, and his
father died mysteriously. The confidence man is a man
without a father, an April Fools world without fathers, no
open rebellion against pernicious Pop, the confidence man
turns to manipulation, to disguise, he attack the confidence
of Brothers--trust, one of the reasons Melville goes after
charity with both fists clenched, trust is sucking on a
mother's breast, not a plastic or foam breast, and the
fatherless, the Motherless child may develop an ego problem,
a problem relationship with the self and the world, the
child, unable to rebel against the father, becomes
manipulative, a confidence man, a pornography of Mother.  We
can trace this idea through the short stories, where
childlessness, bareness, the wasteland, takes a turn in TSI,
where the boys make a friend of their collective
imagination, a Jazz man and a childless family. Who can
forget the poignant scene in M&D where Mason and his father
discuss Mason's responsibilities, the living flesh of bread,
the led, the mysterious words against the earth, the dreams,
the ghosts, the father and sons, or Prairie's quest for a
mother, for a father, for a family, for a home, yes
Stencil's characters are indeed, at least in part
deliberate, based on the veiled references and notes in the
Journal and since dreams and impersonation involve not only
conscious but under the conscious myth making I think that a
both/and reading is not in conflict with the sexual/hunt
theme I am hinting at. 


PS Did Pynchon & Co. do business with BBH?