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[Joseph Tracy]

On Aug 11, 2010, at 11:29 AM, alice wellintown wrote:


> Thanks. Some very fine notes and comments here, analysis, of Profane
> characterization. The fact that Profane is described as Pig-like is
> rather important. We read in the critical writings that Pynchon has a
> thing for pigs and we can certainly trace his interest in them from V.
> to GR. Here in V. pigs are not quite the complex preterite puritan
> figures of P's or slothrop's or, and this is where the focus should
> be, on Adams's and America's heretical puritan ancestry, but are, none
> and never the less, related to slothrop's preterite and puritan  
> sloth....
>  The forces of unity and multiplicityare at work here. For
> Benny, although he doesn't quite get it, LOVE is Half he needs. The
> other Half, the Jewish Half, well...will continue to cut itself and
> stuble in the shadow of Job and Prometheus.
>

Yes I was going to touch on this just a bit. Both Rachel ( cool,  
beautiful, smart, at home with machines and the age of the automobile) 
and Benny ( all around sclemiel, and perhaps too porcine to be fully  
at home in his own Jewishness) seem to follow the classic stereotype  
of the Wandering Jew. This feels like an important part of what keeps  
them from connecting to any place or people. They seem unable to  
imagine "home" in a positive way. But we have little indication this  
comes from their own experience of home, rather it seems like a kind  
of Jungian cultural archetype.

The saddest aspect of Profane, partly resulting from this disconnect  
is not his profanity; he is not really very actively profane, but his  
sterility, which seems to me to numb, rather than expand, his  
perception of the world.

>
> Why Porto (my husband buys my coffee at Porto Rico Importing Co. on
> Bleeker Street) Ricans? Henry Adams spells it that way too: Porto
> Rico. The obvious reason is history; NYC's history and the history
> that Adams describes. The coal power vs. gun power theme that P takes
> from Adams (he sets up 1984 and the cartels) is a major one in GR and
> every major work of his after V.
>