VV(7) Pig on Sartre

[jbor]

----------
>From: kevin at limits.org
>

> Re: the question of Bodine's Sartre usage, I think it's an absolutely
> delicious pun, Bodine assuming the identity of a Rusty Spoon intellectual
> by questioning the assumption of identities.  I also thought of "Prufock,"
> RJ, but the line that jumped to my mind was "to prepare a face to meet the
> faces that you meet."

I like this, Kevin, thanks. And there's probably more to the reference to
Sartre here (at a sub-narrative level) as Kai, Kurt-Werner, Terrance and
others have been discussing. But what I like is the way the surface
reference has been integrated into the narrative to give the reader such a
succinct snapshot of some of these characters.

Pig is totally without intellectual pretension. He likes to drink and screw.

Rachel is nobody's fool, and can see straight through the paucity of real
intellectual substance in much that the WSC affects to "discuss".

And those WSC members who have been holding forth on Sartre and "identity"
at the Spoon ... well, you can just imagine the scene and the dialogue ...

And so, for "the next hour they talked proper nouns", which I take to mean
that Rachel and Pig discussed their mutual acquaintances amongst the WSC,
most probably Benny and Paola in particular. Recall that previous reference
to Paola's note left for Rachel:

     Paola's handiwork, Paola Maijstral the third roommmate. Who
     had also left a note on the table. "Winsome, Charisma, Fu,
     and I. V-Note, McClintic Sphere. Paola Maijstral." Nothing
     but proper nouns. The girl lived proper nouns. Persons, places.
     No things. Had anyone told her about things? ... (51.6)

I doubt that she and Pig would have been discussing Sartre at all after
Pig's line. (Not that that means Pynchon wasn't doing something with the
reference, or that we shouldn't discuss it, of course ... But I still think
that Kai's comment about it being there "to give a flavour of the time" is
right on the money.)

best



~~~
    "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)
                                                    ~~~