VV (19) Disposal of Profane/Brenda

[jbor]

on 7/15/01 3:27 AM, Samuel Moyer at smoyer at satx.rr.com wrote:

> 
> Does anyone doubt that Profane and Brenda commit suicide?  Page 455:
> 
> Hand in hand with Brenda... Profane ran down the street.....  Profane and
> Brenda continued to run through the abruptly absolute night, momentum alone
> carrying them toward the edge of Malta, and the Mediterranean beyond.

That wasn't what occurred to me at all. They are near the "sea steps", the
street was "level and clear". I sort of thought they just went for a
midnight swim. 

It's sort of a happy ending for Benny, or just more of the same. I love his
last words in the novel:

      "The experience, the experience. Haven't you learned?"
      Profane didn't have to think long. "No", he said, "offhand I'd say
    I haven't learned a goddamn thing."

It's a great joke which *The Simpsons* has used to good effect in several
episodes.

> Brenda was a WASP (452) - White Anglo S... no...  It is: Women Airforce
> Service Pilots.

Or maybe both?

> Brenda writes peotry:
> 
> "I am the twentieth century," she read.  Profane rolled away and stared at
> the pattern in the rug.

I think Brenda's poem encapsulates the essential theme of the novel, but it
does so in a sort of self-parodic way. It's very sophomoric and pretentious,
and she is a bit of a twit, but it's exactly the vision of the increasing
inanimacy of human life the novel has been illustrating.

Profane's reaction to the poem is perhaps the same reaction he had to
Stencil's obsession, and in a way both Stencil's (and, indeed, Pynchon's)
vision of some grand cabal might just be pretentious nonsense after all,
like a "paper airplane" or "a phony college-girl poem".

But there's also a big maybe there, which I think you capture quite well.
The pattern in the rug *has* been designed, and so the possibility persists
that maybe there is a design to history after all -- seems to me to be what
is suggested here.

(I think you're onto something with the Henry James allusion too btw.
Hopefully someone will pick up on it.)

best