Benny's Job (2)

[Dave Monroe]

By the way, apologies for the lack of line breaks in
that long response to Terrance.  Something screwed up
at ol' hotmail.com there, did an emergency cut'n'paste
to Yahoo here, there were paragraphs on the screen ...

Anyway, in my infinite patience in re: questions of
methodology ... do note that words do not refer
unproblematically to things, not even
unproblematically to other words (say, "definitions"),
certainly not in any one-to-one way.  And the less
they even approach that asymptotic limit, the more
interesting they become.  Hence "poetics,"
"literature."

And do note that no particular text, not even that
Oxford English Dictionary, is sufficient unto itself,
that no particular text, that no particular body of
texts, does, can, or ever will encapsulate a colsed
universe of possible, probable, potential meaning.  It
is perhaps this realization that leads from
structuralism to poststructuralism, from formalism to
the New Historicism, from New Criticism to
deconstruction, and so forth, no?

So my inclination, in the particular instance at hand,
is to go a bit further than the mere, intratextual
inferrence (and do note it is ONLY an inference
"within" the text of Thomas Pynchon's V., which, for
better or worse, does not include its own glossary)
that "coco" is presumably (again ...) Spanish (or, at
any rate, Hispanic, but, again ...) slang for, er,
"alligator," via a seeming elison (does Spanish, of
whatever dialect, provide for easy differentiation of
the two species?) with "cocodrillo."

Already quite a bit of interpretation, inferrence
going on there, at least as far as an allegedly
strictly "internal" reading of V. goes. 
Interpretation, inference normally elided, effaced as
such in the name of pragmatics, of "everyday,"
"commonsense" usage, but if I'm interested in
anything, it's in prising open, deconstructing, if you
will, such alleged "common sense" and seeing how it
works, how it's constructed.  An interest, by the way,
I infer in those Pynchonian texts as well ...

So we have these "cocos," these "cocodrillos," and we
have the Alligator Patrol so assiduously hunting them
down.  What is the significance of this?  Esp. given
the time, space devoted to it in a text otherwise not
partcularly concerned with alligators, and only
somewhat moreso with sewers and/or hunting.

And why is this Alliagtor Patrol so redolent of the
elaborate intelligence and technology dependent
operations of, particularly, but not exclusively, the
pre-hyphen half of that military-industrial complex
which had emerged and was named as such ((c) Ike) ca.
the writing, publication, and setting of the novel?

These I obviously have taken as hints to look beyond
what is merely in the text, or even in the dictionary,
to what was in the newspapers, on the television, not
to mention in the "sewers" of a so-called "First
World," of the North and/or West as emblematized by
what V. indeed constantly ironizes, problematizes,
subverts as such as "Nueva York." 

Now I of course, and perhaps that pervasive
phoneme/grapheme, "V," was a vector here (giving it no
less, and perhaps even more, credence), heard Vietnam
being evoked here.  And so I played out that scenario.
 "Coco" (which seems to elide crocodiles and
alligators) perhaps echoing, in, again, a
representation of a representation, of the
dehumanization of the enemy Other (rather than an
dehumaization of any actual Vietnamese as alligators),
the slur, "gook."

Also suggested the alleged cannibalism amongst the
alligators as a reference to that North/South
Vietnamese split, which, as with the Koreas, if not
the former Germanies, inverts the typical, Northern,
Western valorizations.  Gee, this gets more and more
interesting every time I restate it, just keep fidning
more and more, without ever quite being sure what the
objection is here ... 

But do you object as well to the, in my estimation,
even more compelling observation made here that "coco"
might perhaps make refernce to U.S. covert ops in
Nicaragua, in Central America, in Latin America, in
teh Western, Monroe (distant cousin, by the way ...)
Doctrined Hemisphere?  Whether or not Terrance
"intended" to be taken seriously, I'll take it up
myself and spare him the acrimony.  Harmonics.

Or to the suggestion, and pardon me for not recalling
just whose very excellent suggestion this was, but,
again, I'll run interference here if necessary, and
let you earn the medal, score the touchdown, whatever,
that Benny's speculation that the alligators, the
"cocos," might want to be shot, might have a
death-wish, might even see death, extermination as
their telos, their destiny (p. 146, er, V., v.ii), is
later echoed not only by the Herero "Empty Ones" of
Gravity's Rainbow, but by Pynchon's own (!)
intervening speculation about similar sentiments among
the actual Herero themselves (see, anyone who hasn't,
the letter inc. as an appendix to David Seed, The
Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon).

Maybe the Vietnamese and the Nicaraguans don't put in
persoanl appearnces in those Pynchonian texts, but the
Herero ... by the way, note that "soul's passage down
the toilet"  (ibid.), can't help hearing tyrone
Slothrop's later more corporeal passage down the same
as an echo as well ...  

Do I consider disagreement with any particular reading
"illegitimate"?  Well, obviously not, as I manage
myself to do it from time to time here.  Not sure why
I'm being called upon to defend readings that neither
Doug Millison nor Charles Hollander have made, but ...
but ultimately just how "diametrical" is it to haggle
over Presence/absence?  Not very, to my impressionable
 Nuevo Critical, Nueveo Historical Derridean mind's
ear.  

Again, there being no "outside-the-text," and, thus,
no "inside-the-text," not if we want to actually read
the damn things, not even if we make all texts subsets
of the alleged master text in poetentia of a
dictionary, of the dictionary of dictionaries (and I'm
sure you've all read yr Borges, so ...), of writing in
general (if not necessarily yr Derrida), one
ultimately selects from or otherwise ineviatbly
resorts to the infinitely various contexts,
inetrtexts, what have you, at hand.

There is apparently some disagreement here over
selection, and, in particular, my particular
selections, but for anyone who feels I'm stretching a
bit in reaching for Vietnam et al. there's, say, Paul
Mackin, who I read as claiming that my contexts of
choice are so obvious as to be unworthy of comment.

Now, to the best of my recollection, those are the
facts of the case, and, at any rate, all the answers
to your questions as I understand them are to be found
"within."  Meant no evasion of the proscuting
attorney's line of interrogation, your honor.  May i
now leave the stand?  Again, sheesh ...




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