VV(11): Mafi-yay

[Dave Monroe]

"Sneaking out of work one lovely day
He met him a dolly called Mafi-yay.

"Mafia thought he had a future ahead,
And looked like she knew how to bounce a bed
Old Roony must have been sick in the head
Cause pretty soon, they up and they wed.

"Now he's got a record company,
A third of the profits plus salary,
A beautiful wife who wants to be free
So she can practice her Theory."

(V., Ch. 8, Sec. ii, p. 221)

Theodore Kharpertian, as J. Kerry Grant (A Companion to V.) reminds, reads 
Mafia Winsome as satirical in general of "the writers of modern romances" 
(Grant p. 71, Kharpertian p. 68), but if ever one of Pynchon's targets was 
clearly in his sights, it's nominal philosopher/novelist, ostensible 
rightwinger Ayn Rand here ...

"Her novels--three to date--ran a thousand pages each and like sanitary 
napkins had gathered in an immense and faithful sisterhood of consumers.  
There'd even evolved somehow a kind of sodality or fan club that sat around, 
read from her books and discussed her Theory."  (V., Ch. 5, Sec. ii, p. 125)

Mafia = gang = sodality = fan club ...

Of course, Rand's novels are notoriously long--The Fountainhead and Atlas 
Shrugged are enormous, although Anthem and We the Living are mercifully 
slim--not to mention longwinded, but it's that "Theory" here that crucially 
differentiates Mafia from that mass of "the writers of modern romances."  
I'd rather not reproduce Rand's "Objectivism" (a word she's ruined for fans 
of William Carlos Williams, as well as of the Neue Sachlichkeit), but what 
Pynchon, as with Benny Profane's putative "theories of history" (p. 214), 
brings to the fore here are the chaotic underpinnings of ostensible order, 
the libidinal underpinnings of ostensibly (and, in Rand's case, loudly 
proclaimed) "rational" thought ...

"It wasn't much of a theory, more wishful thinking on Mafia's part than 
anything else.  There being but the single proposition: the world can only 
be rescued from certain decay through Heroic Love.
   "In practice, Heroic Love meant screwing five or six times a night, every 
night, with a great many athletic, half-sadistic wrestling holds thrown in." 
(p. 125)

Among other such underpinnings, all again dead on when it comes to Rand ...

"Schwartz, a weak, Jewish psychopath who was the major villain" (p. 125).  
Note that "Schwartz" = "black" = two two two prejudices in one ...

"All her characters fell into this disturbingly predictable racial 
alignment.  The sympathetic--those godlike, inexhaustible sex athletes she 
used for heroes and heroines (and heroin? he wondered)"--by the way, note 
how those Pynchonian texts constantly demonstrate various ways of 
reading--"were all tall, strong, white though often robustly tanned (all 
over), Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, and/or Scandinavian.  Comic relief"--not much 
of that in Rand, but ... not seemingly intentionally, at any rate--"were 
invariably the lot of Negroes, Jews and South European immigrants." (p. 126)

Rand, of course, was an atheist, but of Russian Jewish ancestry, and an 
immigrant herself.  Nonetheless, this is the way her novels read.

Rand, like Mafia, was notorious for her infidelity as well.  Nonetheless, 
between a husband and various lovers, she remained childless.  Unlike, 
eventually, Mafia?

"'Aren't you forgetting something," she said, coy and half-scared, flipping 
her hair toward the dresser drawer.
  'No,' said Winsome, 'not that I can think of.'" (p. 222)

There's a strange coda to Mark Walker's The Ayn Rand Cult (q.v.), by the 
way, a sort of "What if ... Ayn Rand had children?" alternate history in 
which Mama Rand becomes both more amiable and more mainstream.  Which brings 
me to ...

Recommended reading ...

Bell-Villeda, Gene H.  The Pianist Who Liked
   Ayn Rand: A Novella and 13 Stories.
   Albuquerque, NM: Amador, 1998.

Gaitskill, Mary.  Two Girls, Fat and Thin.
   New York: Bantam, 1992.

Kharpertian, Theodore.  A Hand to Turn the Time:
   The Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon.
   Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1990.

Olster, Stacey.  "Something Old, Something New,
   Something Borrowed, Something (Red, White, and)
   Blue: Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Objectivist
   Ideology"  The Other Fifties: Interrogating
   Midcentury American Icons.  Ed. Joel Foreman.
   Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996.

Walker, Mark.  The Ayn Rand Cult.
   LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1999.

Walker's book is esp. good on the likely intertexts of Rand's texts. 
Bell-Villeda has written books on Borges, Garcia Marquez and modernist 
aestheticism as well.  Gaitskill's novel is an often amusing, often 
troubling, and always dead on satire of Rand as well.  Strangely, Rand's 
fans don't always quite seem to recognize it as a satire, but ... and note 
that Olster also wrote "When You're a (Nin)jette You're a (Nin)jette All the 
Way--Or Are You? Female Filmmaking in Vineland," in The Vineland Papers: 
Critical Takes on Pynchon's Novel (Ed. Geoffrey Green et al. Normal, IL: 
Dalkey Archive Press, 1994).

And do see the made-for-cable adaptation of The Passion of Ayn Rand as well, 
which is rather less ambivalently critical than the Barbara Branden 
biography it's adapted from (Rand had an affair with the author's husband, 
and one can see the cracks in what's ostensibly offered as a flattering 
account).  There are a few laugh-out-loud moments in the 
nigh-unto-hagiographic documentary, Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life as well, but 
apparently the humor was lost on most of the people at the screening I saw.  
The film adaptation of The Fountainhead is an enduring camp classic, and 
there's a made-for-cable  Atlas Shrugged miniseries just over the horizon.

Keep in mind that the Rand legacy lives on in Objectivist Fed Chairman Alan 
Greenspan.  And I will mention that someone gave me what has apparently 
turned out to be a first ed. of The Fountainhead as a gag gift.  What to do, 
what to do ...

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com