Violence ON Demand

[Terrance]

jporter wrote:
> 
> 
> >>
> >> (Still officially signed off for a while, but since you asked...)

Well, since you won't mind if I get the last word in here
for a while...

You say, 

I tend to think that, surprise, surprise, from the textual
point of view, it doesn't make any difference. The
*farcical* aspects of the
text, e.g., The Playboys, Fina herself, undermine any
serious interpretation
of the overall symbolism.



There are many ways to look at this.
Kai has mentioned Bloom and Joyce's Ulysses. I think that's
very fruitful ground, but since you don't read the critics, 
pard, we can stick to V.   

Benny's Mother is Jewish. His Father is Italian and a devout
Roman Catholic. Benny rejects Fina, a devout Italian RC
virgin from Spanish Harlem.  He goes for Rachel, a wind up
Jewish girl from five Towns Long Island. 

Fina tugs him miraculously. Kook baptizes him with ice cold
water, Wakes him up, he sleeps in their  bath. They get him
a job under the street, hunting and killing alligators,
objects of mercy he return,  with a blast of grace, from
this world below where they have been flushed as disposable
living 
novelties to skins for shoes and belts. Yes they want out,
these empty white ones,  and Benny, after a cheerless
celebration that 
includes being carried like a dead corpse at street level,
hunts them in 
Fairing's Parish and talks to them and even makes a deal
with them, he will 
give them death and they will give him employment, tit for
tat. But Benny 
is afraid of the covenant he has with the alligators, just
as he is spooked by Fairing's Parish and by what he may have
said (LOVE?) to Fina in a phone booth. It's a positive
paranoia he can not bear. In this sense he is like Slothrop,
he would rather listen to the humming of the mechanism
inside his penis. So he  finds a job with in the creases his
hardon makes in the newspaper,  lust after young jail bait,
hollowed eyed creatures, mechanical women, and the woman,
Fina, the progressive Roman Catholic, who doesn't want
marriage before sex, he rejects, she is gang banged, he
takes responsibility, but it's too late, her brother kicks
the shit out of her and sends her back to San Juan (more
stereotype), but not before she spits on the ground at
Benito's feet.