VV(4) - Horus on the Horizon

[Terrance]

V. opens with Profane and the moon. It is during the full
moon that Benny will have "nightmares about that single
abstracted street." He is "visited on a lunar basis by these
great unspecific waves of honiness", and in the dream within
a dream, just like Stencil's dream within a dream in our
current chapter, (the parallels of the mock picaro and the
mock romantic quester) he navigates his way, like Odysseus
or any other Hero after meeting with the Seer, directed by
the witch doctor in this case,  and finds the screw driver
to unscrew his navel, which will cause his ass to fall off
(Sphere is swinging his ass off in that V. Note remember).
The screw driver is located inside a red balloon. A red
balloon, a red face and the sun.  Very sharp young Pynchon,
but we can't forget that the Political is present even in
the Benny story, with dark humor, remember that Shoenmaker's
nose jobs have the Politics of Nazism, that his assistant
Trench amuses himself by throwing scalpels at an award given
to Shoenmaker by the Jewish League, later this will show up
in the Stencil story. And Benny's chief, the mad Brazilian
De Concho, dreams of lunar looking deserts, and nails, above
the mezuzah and the Zionist banner, his gun. Benny,
balefully drunk, pisses on the sun:
 
"It went down; as if he'd extinguished it after all and
continued on immortal, god of a darkened world." 

But before we get to the sun, Pynchon slips in a few stars,
the northern and southern constellations will become more
important later and then turns to the planets and their
orbits. We discussed this. 

Pynchon has got all the traditional devices of satire at
play here--burlesque, caricature, irony, invective,
hyperbole, meiosis, sarcasm, travesty, wit.  His pattern,
which he continues from V. to M&D is Parody, Comedy,
Fantasy. His astronomicals (which, as we know become more
and more important and complex has he matures as an author,
the sun in GR, btw, is THEIR sphere, the wind belongs to the
Rocket) provide some clues to how and why Pynchon subjects
the Benny story, the whole sick crew and their sterility,
lack of originality, decadence,  and so on, and the  Stencil
story, the 20th century decadence and Violence, to parallel
and overlapping satires.

Dave Monroe, did you mention the Shadow and Peter Schlemihl? 

In The Confidence Man, it's not the shadow that is the
Devil's bargain, but what CASTS (long entry in the
dictionary) it. 

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA96/atkins/cmintro2.html


PS Paul M, hope all is well. I won't be getting a pig's or a
plastic heart just yet, thank you for your kind words.
Aristotle says, happiness requires one to be in good fortune
and good health. I hope you are.