VV(7) 2

[jbor]

Good post, kai.

I haven't reread the section yet, and will need to recollect where we last
left off, but had a quick glance and found Pig's comment about Sartre. And,
the fact that it doesn't surprise Rachel to hear it from him because "after
all he had been hanging round the Spoon." (130-1)

It reminded me at first of the line from 'Mortality and Mercy in Vienna'

     Presumably intelligent talk flickered around the room with the false
     brightness of heat lightning: in the space of a minute Siegel caught
     the words "Zen," "San Francisco," and "Wittgenstein," and felt a mild
     sense of disappointment, almost as if he had expected some esoteric
     language, something out of Albertus Magnus.

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/vienna.html

Which in turn reminds of the line from Eliot's 'Prufrock':

        In the room the women come and go
     Talking of Michelangelo.

I think it's a satire on the chattering classes again, the young "bohemian"
poseurs in the jazz clubs and house parties etc etc; but here it's just a
pretentious pseudo-intellectualism which Pig has appropriated
indiscriminately as a pick-up line, isn't it? He blurts it out for no good
reason with some heavy eye action going on; and just before he needed to
have the word "Platonic" explained to him.

Later on the Rusty Spooners will debate Stencil's "Problem" too; they decide
"to call him contemporary man in search of an identity." (226)

best

(thanks jbf)

----------
>From: lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de (Lorentzen / Nicklaus)
>To: JBFRAME at aol.com
>

>   me i think it's, more than anything else, a smalltalk sample to give the
text
>   the flavor of the time. in several of harold brodkey's stories (also in some
>   chapters of "the runaway soul"), which cover about the same period in nyc,
you
>   find this kind of talk for pages and pages. and french authors like camus or
>   sartre were back then a major intellectual fashion [not only in america but
>   also here; when i started to read 'seriously' i found in my mother's
>   book-shelf all those rowohlt paperback editions from the 50s]. the thesis
>   itself was not really new back then. it had been, with a slightly different
>   emphasis, formulated by an american thinker decades before: george herbert
>   mead. see "mind, self and society. from the standpoint of a social
>   behaviorist" [1934, posthum], especially part 3 which deals with the notion
of
>   "identity". perhaps one could say that benny has not enough "identity" while
>   stencil has too much of it.



~~~
    "By 1945, the factory system - which, more than
     any piece of machinery, was the real and major
     result of the Industrial Revolution - had been
     extended to include the Manhattan Project, the
     German long-range rocket program and the death
     camps, such as Auschwitz.It has taken no major
     gift of prophecy to see how these three curves
      of development might plausibly converge, and
                before too long. ... "
                                 (T. Pynchon, 1984)
                                                    ~~~