People that spose to no better standin' round like furniture

[Thomas Eckhardt]

CampbellKim wrote:

> White is associated with death and surface.

Yep, the foremost example in literature of this association is "Moby Dick", as I assume you are very well aware of.

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

"(...) sometimes I think there's naught beyond." Ahab admitting that his hate-fueled hunt directed against an Angry God (who for Ahab certainly has assumed Satanic qualities; thus Ahab is alternatively Angry God and Satan himself ) might in fact be leading nowhere, that the God he makes responsible for his woes - and the plight of all mankind "from Adam down" ("Moby Dick") - might not exist and that the universe might be devoid of all meaning, like a "wide landscape of snow" ("The Whiteness of the Whale"). Ahab is a paranoid who here and in some other passages lapses into the anti-paranoiac mode. That anti-paranoia can be even worse than
paranoia is something we can learn from "The Whiteness of the Whale": The horror of whiteness, traditionally  "the most meaning symbol of  spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity", lies in its suggestion of an empty and meaningless universe, an inanimate cosmos, if you wish.

This, I believe, is a very important point of reference for V.. I don't think the compound "snow-shroud" I mentioned in my notes to chapter one is an accident. Read "The Whiteness of the Whale" and you will find the same kind of imagery. More important though, as regards possible connections to Melville's novel, is the story of Vheissu.

> The Tourist avoids meaning by eschewing commitment (will You be a tourist at Dora?).

"A cheap holiday in other people's misery", as Johnny Rotten put it. (I seem to remember that Greil Marcus said that this was an old slogan of the Situationist Movement).

> In V.,  inanimate objects are invested with human
> characteristics. Humans are subtly inanimated.

Some definitely not well organized and even less well expressed thoughts: The narrator of V. does not describe this process from an elevated, authorial position - this would be psychological realism, I assume  -, much more importantly the notion of this process informs his poetics. His characters and the situations they find themselves in are improbable to the point the whole thing almost but not quite - not yet - lapses into the fantastic ("another world's intrusion into this one"). The improbability is mostly due to the satiric exaggeration of individual instances of this general movement of humanity towards the inanimate. Rachel making
love to her car would be a case in point, another would be Da Conho's machine gun. This is a serious theme, no doubt about it. But a good part of the appeal of V. lies in the farcical aspects of the descriptions of people displaying sexual, fetishist desire for the inanimate. I noted that the tone turns already a little darker when the fetishist relationships between Pig and his Harley and Rachel and her MG are depicted, but at least the latter of these episodes is still funny, I think - balancing on the edge, so to speak, between farce and horror. Questions: Is the farcical orgy at the Sailor's Grave a positive counterpoint to the
individual's desires for machines? No, I assume. It seems to be a celebration of the body and its desires, but we will see in chapter nine that the decadent carnival or masque is not exempt from the movement towards the inanimate but an essential part of it. The scene at the Sailor's Grave nevertheless makes me think more of a celebration than of satire.  The sailor's desires are directed towards cold beer and warm women, what they get are plastic breasts. This might be seen as a first indication of the substitution of "legitimate", natural objects of desire by the fetishes of the inanimate world, but I tend to think for the moment that
this takes the fun away from it.. Is there a way to distinguish between what I mainly see as a good hearted farce and the sinister sado-masochism of "Mondaugen's Story"?

>
>
> 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.

Do you think Heart of Darkness and The Waste Land are satires? Why?

Thanks a lot.

Thomas