Benny's job

[jbor]

----------
>From: <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>


> What "Otherness" in general?
>
> The paranoid white affluent and middle class American 50s
> "Otherness"?

No, this would be the self-perceived and -proclaimed "Centre".

> Is Esther the "other"?

She perceives her own "otherness" and attempts to renounce or rectify it.
She aspires to the "Centre" by getting that nose job. Schoenmaker knows what
it's about ("cultural harmony" 103.bottom). And, I think it's safe to assume
on the strength of this, so does Pynchon.

> Or is the faceless delinquent the "other"?

There are many "others"; but only one "Centre".

>
> "Otherness"?

A by-product of ethnocentrism, cultural & social hegemony, assimilationism
etc. For example, the sort of mentality which thinks it somehow apt that
Vietnamese *people* be analogised as cannibalistic alligators. Or Holocaust
victims as dodoes. &c.

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

By virtue of the valencies and visibility vouchsafed to a vast variety of
ethnicities -- both in _V._ and elsewhere -- I think it both viable and
valid to venture such a viewpoint.

> Also, Pynchon is working off stereotypes.

Perhaps you had better explain this. I think Pynchon's texts subvert -- at
the very least problematise -- ethnic (and other) stereotypes.

> Lost me here jbor?
>
>
> Kook is a nick name. So what?

And "cucarachito" means little cockroach in Spanish. It is not the boy's
given name at all, and represents a cultural/linguistic propensity which is
echoed in the "coco/cocodrilo" example.

> 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.

Certainly not. But, such as they are, they are often apt to reveal more
about the reader than they do about either the text or the author.

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

The argument that "the Holocaust is central" to _GR_ is overtly an
exclusivist approach. The interpretation of _Lot 49_ as a cryptic meditation
on the assassination of JFK is likewise an exclusivist, or ultimate,
approach. And, the reading of the crocodiles in the sewer as an allegory of
covert U.S. militia operations in Vietnam is another example, or symptom, of
such an approach.

I think that Pynchon's portrayal of the apocryphal fabulations emerging
around what might have gone on in Fra Fairing's parish -- and the Fra's own
delusions as documented -- exemplify the relativisms inherent to history,
politics, culture, religion, ethnicity etc.

best