VV(11): Fingernails

[jbor]

----------
>From: Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com>
>

> Oh, yeah, all of that, and then some, no doubt.  And
> that's what I was getting at in re: that "flickering
> fine line."  Again, though, deconstruction does not
> elide, much less eliminate (a la, say, that Hegelian
> aufhebung that's come up recently--and thanks for all
> the notes, Kurt-Werner, much enlightenment, indeed!),
> said binaries ...

No, but it sure does mess them around.

I think one frame might be that Benny envisages things (or at least wants
to, being one of the have-nots and needing a convenient reason for this, or
at least something to blame it on) in that simple binary opposition
("material wealth" vs "getting laid", or "inanimate money" vs "animate
warmth"), but then the ironies or inaccuracies start to creep in on even his
construction ("dead fingernails" vs "living shoulderblades"), and then
finally he goes back to that fatalistic acceptance of his own status in the
world and his prior determination to let chance or Fortuna lead him where it
will: "inanimate schmuck, inanimate paper, pure chance." (215.13)

In this respect I see Benny as an earlier version of Pynchon himself
perhaps, one of those guys that "I can't very well just 86 ... from my life"
but to whom, even so, he might still feel uncomfortable "about lending ...
money, or for that matter even stepping down the street to have a beer and
talk over old times", as he puts it on the very first page of that
extraordinarily-candid _Slow Learner 'Intro'. I think that the model of
Fausto's 'Confessions' (Ch. 11), the various versions of self that are
recalled therein, are very applicable elsewhere in this text as well.

Elision and elimination are your terms, loaded terms at that. Deconstruction
simply describes the way that language structures human conceptions of
"reality". The binary opposition of animate and inanimate, with the former
unequivocally privileged over the latter, is an artificial one, constructed
in and by language, as Pynchon's exemplifications increasingly demonstrate.
If such demonstrations serve to undermine or subvert either the language or
the concepts, and thereby the systems and structures of power and control to
which this language and these concepts are put in society, then all the
better imo.

best