Benny's job

[Terrance]

Korea was in the NY Times everyday, or nearly everyday from
1954-1956. Also in the NY Times during those years: The
Union Labor problems, the Paving problems, the
Sanitation/Sewer/Environmental problems, the Mob problems,
the Boss problems, the Alabama back of the bus problems, the
Stalin problems, Ike's health problems. Of course, things
were not so bad, the subway system in NYC was in the black,
although profitability caused the budget problems and the
fare hike problems, there were plenty of jobs, prosperity,
growth, a good market, and there were the Rocket solutions,
Plastic solutions,  Cold War technological and economic
solutions to all of America's problems. However, Benny
suffers from homesickness for the decade he was born in, the
1930s. 

Certainly two Times are at play here with Benny, the 50s, so
the Suez Crisis... and the 30s, so Union Labor and Bosses
  
But Vietnam? I can't quite make the connection.  That
doesn't mean it's not there, I'm not saying that, but I
simply don't get it. 

Dave says, 

"but I have addressed that little problem of
chronology before, that "Operation Igloo White" as more the
culmination of the type of elaborate military/intelligence
(oxymoronic or no)
operation Pynchon parodies in Operation Alligator Patrol. 
Again, see ... 

Edwards, Paul N.  The Closed World: Computers and the
Politics  of Discourse in Cold War America.  Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1996. 

... excerpted for your conenience at ... "

I'm not sure this solves the problem of chronology, at least
not for me. 
In any event, I think there would need to be more in the
novel
itself to support this idea. What else is there? 

> 
> > the Coco would not be a slur
> > but a typical P allusion.

Coco is a river in Nicaragua. Augusto Nicolas Calderon
Sandino
worked for Standard Oil and and in 1921, what might be
interpreted as the climax of his life occurred when he shot,
but did not kill, Dagoberto Rivas a son of an important
Conservative in the village in retaliation to some comments
which Dagoberto had made about his MOTHER. If you read the
trial I posted,  you will no doubt have noticed that the
U.S. had military volunteers in the Coco river area from
1926-1933 and were found to have violated the 1950s treaties
it signed with Nicaragua. But this doesn't hold water or
alligators or cocos or anything,  but, but if
we are talking about what the novel evokes, evokes during a 
particular reader's  reading, well, it holds whatever we
want to put in it. Flush!



What "Otherness" in general? 

The paranoid white affluent and middle class American 50s
"Otherness"? 

Is Esther the "other"? 

She is  a tourist on the bus in her own city, where "a
faceless delinquent heaved a rock. Cries in Spanish ascended
out of the darkness..." [Chapter 4
paragraph two].  

Or is the faceless delinquent the "other"? 

"Otherness"? 

What about the "tourists" that come to work in NYC,  the
affluent office workers that bring in a summer, a beach, a
sunny world to the Time Square Shuttle? Are they the
"other"? 

What about the "others",  those that  are temporarily
concealed by this sunny
rush hour? What about the residential Fall, the bums, the
old ladies on
relief? Are they the "other"? 

Angelito says that Geronimo is a tourist. He says, Angel
wants to go to
San Juan and live in a hotel and look at puertorriquenos.
Who is the "other" in this situation? 

Isn't it fair to say that you are also attributing this
"otherness", whatever it may be, to Pynchon? To something he
intends?  

Also, Pynchon is working off stereotypes. 

I'm reminded of "On The Road", where the boys go to a diner
"to meet two girls but there are no girls there, only two 
negro girls."


> 
> Wouldn't "cocodrilo" and "coco" simply be the words -- the diminutive
> expressing familiarity, affection -- that Angel and the other Puerto Rican
> boys were using, and which Benny has adopted? 

Yes, this is how I read it. 

In Chapter Six we get more data, more languages and cultures
in contact. Poor Benny, well he is getting an education,
shouldn't have dumped Paola, she knows scraps of every
tongue.  I think from this data it is evident that Benny is
inclined to adopt the language of his new family. 

However, in the paragraph in question, it is Benny and Angel
together in the sewer. Angel does not say coco. No one ever
uses  "cocodrilo" or "coco" prior to or after this. Right? 

"Coco" is the diminutive Spanish of crocodile. 

Now, from my experience, in this concrete outback, it's
quite common for city boys to confuse crocodiles and
alligators, a coco-peccadillo. 

However, the guys are not confused, even the younger kids
know that it is alligators they are hunting. 

But it does make sense that Benny picked coco up from his
new language data.  

But there are no crocodiles in NYC, or in PR, or anywhere
else around here.

The crocodile,  and as far as I have been able to discover,
the alligator, is not an important animal in PR folklore and
myth. 

But, as we discover in the next chapter, Benny is none too
swift with languages and classifications. So....


If we want to get all scientific about it, an alligator is
either of two large temperate-zone amphibious reptiles, the
Chinese alligator
(Alligator sinensis) or the American alligator (A.
mississippiensis). Alligators belong to the family
Crocodylidae, order Crocodylia. They are related to
crocodiles. 




(cf. Cucarachito for Kook at
> 38.5) What seems to be being "elided" in the rush to turn the section into a
> politico-historical fable is Angel & co's stated ethnicity.

Lost me here jbor? 


Kook is a nick name. So what? 

I don't think anyone is attempting to turn the section into
a politico-historic fable. Certainly there is a
political/historical story here, but what it has to do with
Vietnam, I can't get. 

> 
> Again, I think there's an enormous distance between saying that something is
> what Pynchon intentionally "evokes" in his text and saying what something in
> the text is reminiscent of for a particular reader. 

I don't think anyone disagrees with this, but it is an
important point. The text may evoke all sorts of things for
a particular reader and we certainly do not want to silence
these Poems, these reader responses.   


In terms of textual
> interpretation the former approach is anti-pluralist and often leads into an
> interpretative cul de sac imo, 

Well, I disagree here. I don't think that arguing
intentionally is anti-pluralistic. 

Again, you seem to be attributing that "otherness" theme to
Pynchon so...

I'm not taking a New Critical stance here, "the author
intends for us to understand "'this and that'" and since I'm
the authority on "'this and that'" this is what the author
means "'this and that.'" 

I don't think anyone has taken this position here.

A critical pluralism would certainly want to include and not
exclude even the New Critical approach or other approaches
that argue author intentionally.  

If one is going to argue author intent, one has the burden
of supporting it.

This is a difficult task. Difficult for a Melville critic or
a
Dickens critic, more difficult for a Shakespeare critic and
perhaps even more difficult for the Pynchon critic. 

The reasons for this are obvious. 
 

particularly where the so-called "allusions"
> remain undeveloped and *uneditorialised* (within the text, or elsewhere) by
> the author.



Well, I would say some are developed and editorialized
within
the fiction, prose, letters, and so forth. However, a critic
that builds an argument that claims authorial intent needs
as much evidence as possible, but it's not available. 

If we want to be pluralistic about it, we can be.