Benny's Job

[Dave Monroe]

... a-ha, I see we're on to Chapter Six, very good, will have to print out 
this most recent digest to peruse, pursue, but, in the meantime, speaking of 
taking a "big risk," I do think some clarification is in order here: "The 
sort of mentality which thinks it somehow apt that Vietnamese *people* be 
analogised as cannibalistic alligators. Or Holocaust victims as dodoes. &c." 
  Analogy, allegory, symbol, metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, what have you 
(and I'd tend to agree with anyone who claims that they are indeed 
significantly different tropes, not in the least when it comes to questions 
of "aptness," so long as they specify how so), do note that the 
"mentalities" in question (i.e., those, apparently, of Doug and myself, and 
I'm presuming that that "c." includes, for starters, whoever mentioned that 
the alligators' presumed "death wish" anticipated that of the Herero "Empty 
Ones" in Gravity's Rainbow, and cf. Pynchon's own speculations about a 
certain Herero "death wish" in that letter appended to David Seed's The 
Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon) are reading Pynchon as making such 
comparisons, as utilizing such tropes, and not making, utilizing them 
themselves.

Again, here's where caveats concerning assumptions of authorial "intention," 
of what a presumed "genius" might or might not "intend," much less write, 
come into play.  It has been hinted here that Pynchon's texts might not only 
not be what we've come to call "politically correct" (which reminds me to 
ask, since when did it become wrong to be "correct"?), but that Pynchon 
himself isn't, either.  Sometimes by the same readers who then take offense 
when the same possibility is hinted, intentionally or, in my case, at the 
very least, otherwise ...

I obviously take no immediate offense at the possibility of alligators 
allegorizing Vietnam, the Vietnams, maybe even the Vietnamese, in V.  
Representations of a representation, of the wartime dehumanization of the 
enemy "Other" (cf. my comments about a possible allusion to the slur, 
"gook").  Cf., say--and here might be another, albeit particularly oblique, 
intertext--the "bugs" in Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, exemplars, 
whether or (more likely) not RH "intended" them to be (though Paul Verhoeven 
certainly read them as such in adapting the novel to film).  And by all 
means see ...

Dower, John.  War Without Mercy: Race and Power in
   the Pacific War.  New York: Pantheon, 1986.

... which, by the way, makes Benny's seemingly nagging sympathy for them, 
despite his ultimate performance of his duties, all that more 
understandable, and certainly makes BP more sympathetic as well ...

But I'm more immediately inclined to ask the question, what's more 
"offensive," the remarking of a possibly (or possibly not, this is indeed a 
matter of reception here) "offensive" element by an author   whom, 
apparently, is presumed to be incapable not only of having intended any such 
"offense," but even of being read as having done so,  "inetntionally" or 
otherwise, or indignation at said, alleged "offense" being possibly feigned 
(and, at any rate, eminently readable as such) merely in an attempt to make 
those with whom one does not agree seem "offensive"?  We all tire of 
constantly being painted with certain brushes here, no matter how easily 
washed off the paint ultimately, inevitably proves to be.  Do not bother to 
reel in the line ...
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