V.V.(8) Chapter Six - commentary, part 1

[Michael Perez]

     We learn a great deal about Benny the schlemiel in this chapter,
particularly about his attitude toward romance and his own self-image. 
All of the major motifs that have already been evident in the book are
present here in force.  The interaction of the animate and inanimate,
the allusions to the Pentecost story, the decision between and the
effects of *virtú* and *fortuna*, and the presence and fall from grace
of a White (well, Brown, anyway) Goddess all play a part in the
adventure of this temporary stopover for Benny the picaro.  In
addition, there is a good deal in common with motifs in another Pynchon
work, the short story “Entropy.”
     Benny states that women “always happened to” him “like accidents.”
 His relationship with the woman in this chapter was unbalanced from
the beginning.  In true Benny fashion, he obeys her wishes (“’Man you
go find a job,’ Kook said. ‘Fina says so.’”)  and gets a job.    He
stumbles into the opportunity to work with her other brother and his
friend shooting cocos in the sewer.  Then the problems start and
eventually he considers “time exposed to any possibility of getting
involved with Fina as assbreaking, wageless labor” [136.20].  When he
prefers to watch a Randolph Scott western rather than talk and she
pouts and he asks “Why did she have to behave like he was a human
being” [137.11]  He wants to “be just an object of mercy” [137.12]
     There are many times in this chapter that Benny is connected to
the inanimate.  He “figured at first that he was the disembodied object
of a corporal work of mercy” [134.3] and, as above, wants to remain
just that.  The music at the after-hours club are “the sounds inanimate
calluses slapping inanimate goatskin, felt hitting metal, sticks
knocking together” [135.34]  When he passed out drunk, the others
carried him around “all chanting, ‘Mierda.  Mierda.  Mierda.’” [136.8]
     At the feast he introduces himself as Benny Sfacim [“semen”],
which the girls did not like, but he goes on to say that they did not
allow him to finish and states that his real last name is Sfacimento,
which Pynchon translates as “destruction or decay” [140.22], which
“isn’t bad at all” [140.24].  The girls themselves are described as
“shiny-machined breast- and buttock-surfaces” [139.19].  Benny observes
that the people in the street at the feast “seemed no more logical than
the objects in his dream” [139.16} and remarks that “They don’t have
faces” [139.17].
     Language also plays a big role in the chapter.  When Benny is
taken to the after hours club, everybody spoke Spanish and Benny 
“responded in what Italo-American he’d heard around the house as a kid”
[135.18].  It should also be noted that they have been drinking Gallo
wine, probably jug wine that could be described as relatively “new
wine,” which also links it, arguably, to the Pentecost story (see Acts
2:13).  At the Italian feast, Angel points out to Benny, after Benny
remarks that Little Italy wasn’t a foreign country, that Geronimo is a
tourist.  Benny begins to notice how many different languages are being
spoken as he walks around and asks himself  “how was that for a
tourist’s confusion of tongues?” [140.1]  Communication, in general, is
problematic throughout the episode between men and women, different
cultures, and among people in the same family or extended (however
temporary) family.
     Some communication problems lead to various degrees of
determination toward action and resignation to the winds of fortune. 
Benny still believes that women just happen to him and that he can
allow himself to be a stray to be taken home, rather than accept the
credit or take the blame for anything that happens.  At least he admits
that he is usually wrong and a certain among of self-agency is
necessary even for him to continue to exist as the compromised
schlemiel that he has become.
     Benny is generally considered to be the representative of fortune
and Stencil of virtú in the book.  However, like the ancient Chinese
symbol “T’ai-chi T’u” (“Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate,” according to
Fritjof Capra) the dualistic relationship of Yin/Yang or
Profane/Stencil are opposite, but not mutually exclusive.  The is a bit
of the schlemiel in “he who seeks V.” and there is the bit of the
mensch in the schlemiel.
     Benny does allow himself to be at the end of a yo-yo string, but
occasionally does make a decision on his own.  They are not always good
decisions, but nevertheless a sign that some virtú operating in his
character.  The decision to send Fina away when she decided it was time
for her to no longer remain a virgin required some skill in dealing
with a problem.  On the one hand, as he considers, “How long could Fina
herself hold out?” [145.8] and by inference why not him?  On the other,
however, is the destruction of a well-balanced division of the street
and below the street.  After she does receive the gang bang he
predicted she might, “having in a way asked for it” [145.11], his
decision to leave the confines of the Mendoza household may seem an
obvious choice, but not one totally left to fortuna.  Ultimately even
the most carefree schlemiel must decide at what point to accept a
situation, remain under its influence, and when to flee.
      Benny’s decision to take to the “dream-street” [151.23] follows
the descent into chaos of his temporary world.  He says “What peace
there had been was over” [151.22].  All this because one young woman
had been deflowered.  Of course, Fina was not just a woman, she was a
“spiritual leader” [137.27], a mother figure, a virgin, “St. Fina of
the Playboys” [144.32], a Brown Goddess.  She stops a rumble merely by
walking in the midst of it.  “The air turned summer-mild, a boys’ choir
on a brilliant mauve cloud came floating over from the direction of
Canal Street singing O Salutis Hostia; the board chairman and the Bop
King clasped arms in token of friendship as their followers stacked
arms and embraced; and Fina was borne up by a swarm of pneumatically
fat, darling cherubs, to hover over the sudden peace she’d created,
beaming, serene.” [144.33]  All that ends with the termination of her
virginity.
     Graves in _The White Goddess_ goes on for some length on the
origins of the need “for chaste behavior of the Vestals” [_WG_ 349] 
and the hazards of the deflowering of spiritual representatives in
Chapter 20, “A Conversation at Paphos A.D. 43.”  The former virgin was
sometimes put to death.  Benny does not stick around to see if that is
Fina’s fate, but he presumes it is.  If she is dead, he no longer has
someone for whom he is an object of mercy.  The Mendoza family itself
seems doomed to chaos.  Fina was the only one in the family with a
steady job.  Her whole family were objects of her mercy and she was
respected as such - people did what she told them to, until Benny.
     This descent into disorganization has some arguable similarities
to events in Pynchon’s story “Entropy,” which was written around the
time Pynchon was still working on _V._.  Benny had achieved a sort of
balance between his street life and his below the street life, like
Callisto’s “ecological balance” [_SL_ 84.3] within his room.  Inside
and outside, above and below were kept separate.  Callisto says of
himself, in Henry Adams third person style:  “His had always been a
vigorous, Italian sort of pessimism:  like Machiavelli, he allowed the
forces of *virtú* and *fortuna* to be about 50/50; but the equations
now introduced a random factor which he found himself afraid to
calculate.” [_SL_ 87.35] Callisto’s hermetically sealed world is
breached when the bird he had been trying to nurse dies and Aubade
breaks the window in order to allow the outside world to disorganize
their closed system.  Benny's world disintegrates when Fina’s hymen is
broken and he knows it was time to end his stay within the Mendoza
family.
     Benny also has affinities to the “Entropy” sick crew in Meatball’s
apartment.  Saul and Miriam split up over a “language barrier” [_SL_
90.28].  Saul says:  “Dehumanized.  How much more human can I get? . .
. There are Europeans wandering around North Africa these days with
their tongues torn out of their heads because those tongues have spoken
the wrong words.  Only the Europeans thought they were the right
words.” [_SL_ 90.22]  Benny, who would rather be dehumanized,
nevertheless has a vocabulary it seemed was made up of nothing but
wrong words” [137.3].  It’s not that I believe meant for these the
chapter and the story to be entirely parallel but it is interesting to
observe the dramatic solutions that obsessed him at the time the two
texts were written.  





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