VV(7) Pig on Sartre

[Slug]

Father Fairing's Latin is not so fair. That's rather odd,
isn't it? He says there are different kinds of Marxism. 


The Hunt for Love and Death by  Dialegesthai [Greek to talk
with] and Agon ("Freud's originality stemmed from his
aggression and ambition in his agon with biology" (Harold
Bloom). [Greek agon]

Freud's agonistic conception of the relation between the
instinct of life and of death is brought into the circle by
Norman O. Brown's Dialectic. "We need," Brown says,  instead
of an instinctual dualism and instinctual dialectic
.The
difference between a dualism of the instincts is small and
elusive; but slight shades of difference at this fundamental
level can have large consequences." LAD.83

Speaking of Dialectic Sartre says, 								


It surpasses by conserving, but the terms of the surpassed
contradiction cannot account for either the transcending
itself or the subsequent synthesis; on the contrary it is
the synthesis which clarifies them an enables us to
understand them. For us the basic contraction is only one of
the factors which delimit and structure the field of
possibilities; it is the choice which must be interrogate if
one wants to explain them in their detail, to reveal their
singularity (that is, the particular aspect in which in this
case generality is presented), and to understand how they
have been lived. It is the work or the act of the individual
which reveals to us the secret of his conditioning. Flaubert
by his choice of his writing discloses to us his childish
fear of death-not the reverse. By misunderstanding these
principles, contemporary Marxism has prevented itself from
understanding meanings and values. For it is as absurd to
reduce the meaning of an object to the pure inert
materiality of the object itself as to want to deduce the
law from the fact.  Questions de methode, trans. Barnes
pp.151-52. 

Sartre's Dialectic brings Marx into the circle, but he wants
the inquirer, the person, to be at the center.

"It is INSIDE the movement of Marxist thought that we
discover a flaw of such a sort that despite itself Marxism
tends to eliminate the questioner from his investigation and
to make the questioned the object of an absolute Knowledge."
Qdm.175

Once these have been remedied, that is, according to Sartre,
once Marx has been brought into Sartre's circle, the
dialectical unity will eliminate the need for existentialism
itself and will become the foundation of all inquiry. 
 
"From the day that Marxist though will have taken on the
human dimension (that is, the existential project) as the
foundation of anthropological Knowledge, existentialism will
no longer have any reason for being. Absorbed, surpassed,
and conserved, by the totalizing movement of philosophy, it
will cease to be a particular inquiry and will become the
foundation of all inquiry." Qd,.181

Brown (not mentioned in this chapter), Marx, Sartre,
Augustine, Ignatius, Paul, Plato, dialectician all, but not
Veronica and not Freud (not mentioned in this chapter),
Eros/Thanatos. 




Aboard a destroyer Profane talks to a sea gull, "suppose I
was God," and imagines that he can Zap a cattle car off a
pier, hurl a thunderbolt at an SP or cause Patsy Pagono to
grow wings and fly away. After failing to accomplish any of
these fantastic feats, he presumes that God's powers are
charged with more benevolent magic, and so he point a finger
at Dewey Gland and commands him to sing "that Algerian
pacifist song," but Dewey sings Blue Suede Shoes Elvis style
instead. So much for a schlemiel playing God.  In conflict
with the inanimate world above the street, Profane decides
to go under the street to hunt alligators, and Profane talks
to the alligators. Under the street, Profane hunts
alligators through the holy waters of Father Fairing's
Parish. Father Fairing talks to rats. The Rats are not like
the sea gull that ignores Benny on the ship. They are not
like the alligator that he thinks might be "lazy, or old or
stupid" or "tired of living" and which he is "so sorry to
shoot," -Stencil is shot in the ass-for these are not
ordinary Rats, these are Saints that argue Religion,
History, and Philosophy. 



Profane talks to a sea gull, but the sea gull ignores him.
He attributes human characteristics to the alligator that
may be ascribed to this chapter's Stencil. He sees the
alligator as old, lazy, stupid, tired of living, coy, a
little sad. He wonders, " is it saying anything to me?" He
is sentimental and superstitious and before shooting at it,
he thinks, "Surely the alligator would receive the gift of
tongues." At the end of the chapter, Stencil, with shot gun
pellets in his left buttocks, shifts his old, creaky, middle
aged, wrinkled body into Fu's Plymouth, feeling like "the
alter kocker (Yiddish-"Old Fart") Rachel may have thought he
was." 

Before Benny, not Pointy,  Blundered, the Alligator "turned
to face him." Benny, "sentimental," "superstitious," refers
to himself first a "schlemiel" and next a "schlimazel" and
as Benny is at the moment of crisis, the epiphany, for both
he and Stencil, he thinks,  "Surely the Aligator will
receive the gift of tongues, the body of Father Fairing be
resurrected, the sexy V. tempt him away from murder."

See. Pynchon's early labyrinths. Hawthorne, Mark D.