People that spose to no better standin' round like furniture

[CampbellKim]

"Historians undertake to arrange sequences,---called
stories, or histories---assuming in silence a relation
between cause and effect...American female...was a goddess
because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was
production---the greatest and most mysterious of all
energies; all she needed was to be fecund." 
			The Education of Henry Adams, An Autobiography

Historical considerations in v. are based on an exploration
of the mystery of causation and the meaningfulness in the
contiguity of events. 


Modern Fiction Studies 45.3 (1999) 600-620 "More Advanced
the Deeper We Dig": Ratner's Star by David Cowart 

Eliot, T. S. "The Hollow Men." Collected Poems 1909-1962.
London: Faber, 1963. 87-92. 

Johnson, Samuel. Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose. Ed.
Bertrand H. Branson. New York: Holt, 1958. 

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. 1726. Ed. Herbert
Davis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962. 

Voltaire. Candide. 1759. Trans. Lowel Bair. New York:
Bantam, 1959. 
 
History in V. is also defined through the symbol of the hothouse,
temporal homesickness, the role of mirror time and clocks,
clothing, attention paid to the role of political events,
the different attitudes toward words that affect world views
and actions, the presence of magical causation, the
relationship between Myth and Deity and their possible
organizing agency, the existence of conspiracy, and the effects of
randomness.


In V. "The Situation" is basically a social phenomena in a
world in which normal causality is replaced by chance and symbolic
identification of V. and other characters within a
"non-chronological narrative." The "narrative" includes
first person narration by Stencil, who when not
impersonating someone else, refers to himself in the third
person. The associations perceived by the characters are
invested with meaningfulness not appropriate to their
relations and these associations are the agents that spur character
behavior. The process of recognizing the meaningfulness of
associations is complicated by the problems that the characters have in interpreting events. The statements that the characters make about how the world
is ("the case") reflect their  ethical views and the machinations of their imaginations.


Annihilation.


How do characters deal with loss of the Virgin, the gods,
the myths of culture and the cultural presence of human annihilation?  

Can it be glossed over by gaudy surfaces? By painting it white?
By Vheissu? Can the color white counter the gaudiness of
decadent history? 

What Irony functions here? 

White is associated with death and surface. 

Disguise is also a surface that covers, preventing
the discovery of what lies beneath; 

The Tourist avoids meaning by eschewing commitment (will You be a tourist at Dora?). 
 
The disguise and the tourist mentality are both means of avoiding knowledge. 

We see here in the early chapters that it is Benny Profane, that
self-proclaimed schlemiel, who provides one of the glosses
in the book concerning the disturbing qualities of the
inanimate and human love for an object.

The Gun! 

In V.,  inanimate objects are invested with human
characteristics. Humans are subtly inanimated. This process
involves the usurptation of cultural power for the
deification of the Dynamos and their Angels of Death. By
dispossessing Man of gods (virgin) history/nightmare
divests humans of human characteristics through reification
(note how Characters use of Personification). Once humans
have been divested of their human characteristics through
reifications they are then re-invested with pseudo-human
characteristics--the Human becomes an object or fetish. 


Humans become artificial objects masquerading as humans, a
poor substitute for humanity. But they are perfectly
adapted, acceptable as citizens of history/nightmare of 
decadence (in Fausto's terms, "moving toward non-humanity." Irony and
satire are the game for the young Thomas Pynchon here, his
targets are the dull and single-mindedly analytical. This use
of satire places Pynchon within a tradition of literature
which attributes inanimate or non-human qualities to those
satirized. Ones that come to mind are Gulliver's Travels,
Hard Times, Heart of Darkness and The Waste Land. Here in these opening chapters
we can see that this Irony and Satire involves the
expression by characters of a  peculiar love
for objects. But it also works with impersonation and the
carnival use of disguise, voyeurism and the use of mirrors,
decadence and disease, tourism and the "Street", and
seemingly sentient automata.


See Rainer Maria Rilke's Requiem Fur Eine Freundid and the
Robert Hass Introduction to The Selected Poetry of RM Rilke. 

"The key to the idea is the mirroring...I don't think Rilke
ever made a plainer  statement of what he wanted art to be:  cessation of desire;
a place where our inner emptiness stops generating that need
for things which mutilates the world and turns it into badly
handled objects..."


Profane thinks that inanimate objects are hostile and
threaten his survival. By ascribing human characteristics to inanimate objects,
Profane is at times uncertain what is or is not animate
(this will be discussed at some length I'm sure, my own
opinion is that Thomas Pynchon's fiction insists that
technology is neutral).


PS I think Benny is pissing on the cosmic center of the universe because he can't deal with the human. 
Like talking about the Holocaust or African Politics while your children's nanny wheels them through the world of life and love and busy, busy, busy days. He identifies with the cosmic agency here and his  impersonation  of the Angel of Death is the parodic manifestation, "Mezuzah" is a New Testament pun here, "prophylactic" and "phylactery" and is an example of how sexual desires have co-opted spiritual aspirations. Profane is mock Prometheus, Job, god, "suppose I was god
if I was god
Zap
" and in this example Moses and the authors of J/C history. His sums it up thus, the impetus of human history is the desire for sexual satisfaction. 

Blue Angel, that's the poem I want here, Allen Ginsberg....