VV(11): Winsome

[Terrance]

Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> "Gouverneur" - "r" = "Gouveneur."  "R" gone .


Thanks Dave Monroe. I've only read about half of your posts
and a few others. 

Very busy here, busy. I'm busier than a one armed paper
hanger,
but just  want to mention a few things here. 

First, Mortality And Mercy In Venice 


http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/vienna.html

This short story is the one that comes to mind most when
reading this particular chapter, winsome, Irving, Rachel,
host, so on...but again, Small Rain, TSI, Entropy too. 

The Father Confessor is first the RC Priest, then Nietzsche
"poet liar" and
"father confessor" (Beyond Good and Evil) and Freud. 
Neo-Freudians like Norman O. Brown too are P sources and 
Marcuse, who  turns
Brown back against the dialectic, and also Jungian
Catholics. 

But the Priest 

(again it's very important to  understand Catholic
terminology in P's work--why P was, so
the report goes, going to Confession, is that Catholics have
to go to Confession so they may eat the body and blood of
their God, no symbolic gesture that, but a kind of magic)


is now the doctor or dentist. 


Note that in MMV the healer/prophet is contrasted with the
doctor--shoenmaker &
eiginvalue and fortune teller. 

Why has Blicero no guilt? 

Why does Weissmann want to be guilty? 

Why is Fopple guilty? Why doesn't he know why he is guilty? 

And so on. 

Here it is Freud that jumps out. P is working the Freudian
Guilt against Roman Catholic Guilt, not the stereotype that
may come to mind, even if you are a Catlick, in which case
it's not only a stereotype but a slur.  

Note how Fina and Rachel (Rach) are Mothers and Fathers to
Benny (Ben). Benny,
like all the Brothers, boys in the 1950s part of the novel
can't grow up--How I learned to love the bomb--Eros and
Thanatos.  The brothers rebel against the father, the despot
is killed, patricide, but the brotherhood soon develops an
order, a fatherhood, successors and guilt, and civilization
tends towards self-destruction. 

There is, as we learn in GR, not just the problem
of political anrachy/synthesis and control, but the problem
of guilt (Robert, see GR.453-54 for guilt and the tourists, 
and there is no business like Holocaust Business). Guilt is
the most powerful force 
in the world and so THEY must manufacture it, distribute it,
study it, turn it into 
an amusement, a Disney Land or Holocaust business, and
CONTROL it to maintain POWER and Control. That's your answer
to Weissmann/Blicero. Marcuse does a good job on
this in Chapter 3 "The Origin of Repressive Civilization
(Phylogenesis" of *Eros and Civilization*, but clearly P
read Freud's *Moses and Monotheism* (not small interest in
Moses in those Pynchonian texts--Enzian). Also, Robert, what
has Mafia to do with Sartre? She has much to do with  *Love
In The Western World* as does this novel. 

Winsome and Mafia are, like the rest, beyond redemption.
They are just obviously so. Winsome's conversations with
Sphere are quite humorous, he's an almost grown up Southern
version of the New England college boys Sphere hates having
to put up with to earn his living, thinking at one point he
would like to stick his white ivory sax right up their white
assess. 

Mafia's intellectualism is phalocentric. Isn't it? 

Is Pig a  Benny doppelgänger? His Catholic repression?