VV(11): The Geographical Center

[jbor]

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>From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
>

> I'm assuming here that the "Public Library" in whose "little park"
> (Bryant Park? Doesn't look all too "little") on whose "bench" Benny
> sits, is the famed Mid-Manhattan branch (trunk?)  with the lions out
> front of the New York Public Library, @ Fifth Avenue between 40th and
> 42nd Streets

I can almost envisage Pynchon himself "on the bench behind the Library"
(214.31) pondering the inscrutable ways in which "history unfolds" after
poring over some of the documents and texts in that very same establishment.
There's a good summary and a copy of one such source at PynchonFiles:

http://www.pynchonfiles.com/datavallett.htm

       In David Seed's superb study, _The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas
    Pynchon_, a letter from Pynchon, Jan 8 1969, is printed with his
    permission as an appendix. In response to Thomas F. Hirsch (who was
    writing a graduate paper on the South African Bondelzwarts
    Natives) Pynchon wrote back his sources for Chapter Nine of _V._ This
    chapter was born in 1960 at the New York Public Library as Pynchon
    looked for details on a 1919 Maltese nationalist uprising.

It seems that sheer luck had a lot to do with all that Herero data which
Pynchon (not to mention a critic or ten!) has gotten so much mileage out of.
Which is ironic, to say the least.

And I particularly like the somewhat coterminous narratorial admission of "a
genuine desire to see young people get together" at 214.31, which pre-empts
the précis/motto of Chapter 10 (p. 280). It seems to me that this simple
sentiment remains constant throughout Pynchon's fiction, right up to the
representation of the tantalisingly-near blossoming of young love between
Ethelmer and Tenebrae in _M&D_.

Profane's reliance on aleatory events (the paper fold cf. a coin toss trick
at 215.7), and the seeming tenacious perversity of the inanimate to mock
probability (the way that Benny is always and inevitably destined to be
dogged by the "luck of a schlemihl" at 216.28) seems to preempt further
attention to such themes in _GR_ with Poisson, Slothrop's stars et. al., but
it reminds me quite a bit of Tom Stoppard's _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Are Dead_ as well, which is, despite the playwright's humble protestations
to the contrary, also somewhat of a homage to Beckett's _Godot_ (and Beckett
gets a significant nod in Pig and Charisma's "drinking song" in Part III at
225.1). Theatre of the Absurd anyone?

I also like the way that "Pig and Profane remembered sea stories at each
other" (223.4), which idiosyncratic prepositional usage brings to the fore
many familiar themes w/r/t embellished "history", thwarted communication,
treating humans as inanimate objects u.s.w.

best