VV(11): History Unfolds

[Dave Monroe]

"Material wealth and getting laid strolled arm-in-arm in the midway of
Profane's mind.  If he'd been the type who evolves theories of history
for his own amusement, he might have said all political events: wars,
governments and uprisings, have the desire to get laid as their roots;
because history unfolds according to economic forces and the only reason
anybody wants to get rich is so he can get laid steadily, with whomever
he chooses."  (V., Ch. 8, sec i, p. 214) Note, of course, how material
impoverishment and getting laid just previously "strolled arm-in-arm in
the midway of Profane's mind" as well: "You're jobless, I'm jobless,
here we are both out of work, let' screw" (p. 213).  Regardless of who
or what it is strolling with, getting laid is obviously the main
attraction in (that Baudelairean/Surrealist arcade, that Carnival, that
Street that is) "the midway of Profane's mind."  But also note that
libidinal theories of history and economics have of course become
commonplace, e.g. ... Freud, Sigmund.  Civilization and Its
Discontents.   Trans. James Strachey.  New York: W.W. Norton, 1961
[1930]. Marcuse, Herbert.  Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical
Inquiry   into Freud.  Boston: Beacon Press, 1966 [1955]. Brown, Norman
O.  Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning   of History.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1985 [1959]. All of which are of no small
import to those Pynchonian texts, and see more recently ... Goux,
Jean-Joseph.  Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud.   Trans.
Jennifer C. Gage.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990. But note what happens
in Pynchon's novel ...    "He'd thought himself into an erection.  He
covered it with the Times classified and waited for it to subside....
"He happened to look down.  His erection had produced in the newspaper a
crosswise fold, which moved line by line down the page as the swelling
gradually diminished.  It was a list of employment agencies.  OK, though
Profane, just for the heck of it I will close my eyes, count three and
open them and whatever agency listing that fold is on I will go to
them.  It will be like flipping a coin: inanimate schmuck, inanimate
paper, pure chance." (pp. 214-5) Without necessarily having "evolved a
theory of history," "for his own amusement" or otherwise, Benny has
nonetheless enacted, and will nonetheless take action as the result of,
such a theory.  Benny's "history" does indeed "unfold," "line by line,"
as it were, as indeed the result of "economic forces" with "the desire
to get laid at their roots."  "Pure chance"?  Maybe, maybe not.  But
"agency" ... well, note that "inanimate schmuck."  Nonetheless, Benny
does exercise agency in abnegating any agency in choosing, or, at any
rate, determining, which agency to go to.  And cf. questions of, quests
regarding, causality, chance, agency, determinism, theories of history,
vis a vis Gravity's Rainbow's Tyrone Slothrop and his own "inanimate
schmuck" (J. Kerry Grant, in his recent A Companion to V., glosses this
as if "schmuck" = "penis" exclusively, though I read it as referring to
Benny as a whole.  See Grant p. 110) ...