V.V. (11): Mafia

jbor jbor at bigpond.com
Sat Mar 10 17:26:28 CST 2001


It's very interesting that the earlier précis of Mafia's character and her
novels' themes is explicitly Roony's:

    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) were all
    tall, strong, white though often robustly tanned (all over),
    Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, and/or Scandinavian.  Comic relief and villainy
    were invariably the lot of Negroes, Jews and South European
    immigrants. (126.2)

Of course, the rest of that (elided?) paragraph is incredibly important:

    Winsome, being originally from North Carolina, resented her urban or
    Yankee way of hating Nigras. During their courtship he'd admired her
    vast repertoire of Negro jokes. Only after the marriage did he discover
    a truth as horrible as the fact she wore falsies: she was in nearly
    total ignorance about the Southron feeling toward Negroes. She used
    "nigger" as a term of hatred .... Winsome was too upset to tell her
    it was not a matter of love, hate, like or not like so much as an
    inheritance you lived with. ...

Roony's somewhat hypocritical distinction between types of racism is what is
foregrounded in this (disparaging and self-pitying) meditation on his wife
and her work. (In a similar way he later denounces the legend of Davy
Crockett but ventures an equally fanciful and distorted legend of Roony
Winsome in its place.)

In the current section Mafia's conversation with Benny reveals a somewhat
different state of play imo:

     "You tell me you are half-Jewish and half-Italian," Mafia was saying in
    the other room. "What a terribly amusing role. Like Shylock, non è vero,
    ha, ha. There is a young actor down at the Rusty Spoon who claims to be
    an Irish Armenian Jew. You two must meet." (224.11)

I think that Mafia's comments here indicate that there is a little more to
her Theory than Roony allows. Eg. nationality, or at least the self-
proclaimed hybrid "nationalities" which Benny and Fergus have assumed, she
describes as a "role" -- Fergus an "actor", that mention of Shylock -- which
all ties back in to the previously-mentioned Spoon-talk about "Sartre's
thesis that we are all impersonating an identity" at eg. 130.34. It will no
doubt be unpopular to suggest that Mafia, and thus Rand, are being linked
here to Sartre by Pynchon, but such certainly appears to be the case.
Whatever, there's not the out-and-out simplistic dismissal of Mafia as a
character as has been implied imo. Her next comment, in response to Benny's
complaint that the Spoon is "out of my class" yields yet another layer of
subtlety to Mafia's Theory:

     "Rot," she said, "class. Aristocracy is in the soul. You may be a
    descendant of kings. Who knows?" (224.18)

I can't help thinking of the Kennedys and Camelot and that whole utopianist
political charade which is the U.S of A. when I read this. And, of course,
Rand's advocacy of the "virtue of selfishness" as exemplified by both
laissez-faire capitalism and sexual promiscuity, her contempt for Communism
and social welfare initiatives, the explicit anti-African (and thus by
implication anti-African American? cf Crockett as "a towering and
clean-limbed example of Anglo-Saxon superiority" at 220.1)) pronouncements
-- neatly packaged as a populist philosophy reaching millions -- has
provided (and does still?) a real boon to that idiosyncratically American
Cold War/moon-walk/Desert Storm nationalism which characterised the American
mindset and has sustained the regime since WWII.

best







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