V ch. 5 part 2 Imaginary Alligators, Real buckshot

[Joseph Tracy]

I have a hard time seeing the sexism here. How is Mafia/Rand treated  
as less of a sexist caricature than Schoenmaker. Why is Rand/Mafia  
and her bizarre brand  of liberation less a proper target of satire  
than Schoenmaker the nose job man,  Bongo Shaftsbury the imperial  
thug and would-be child molester, or Fairing the missionary to those  
vermin truly dwelling in darkness,  or even the milder Zeitsuss the  
aspiring union leader.. All of these are about the heroic poses of  
venal  people, and their capacity, by donning heroic masks, to  
generate followers and endorse  cruel power structures..   
Considering  Ayn Rand's nasty impact on US culture, the attack is  
presciently well targeted and more  comical than vicious.  Also, the  
entire scene is observed from the point of view of Roony Winsome  who  
is not exactly a reliable or admirable narrator..  By including Mafia/ 
Rand and Winsome in the company of the Whole Sick Crew Pynchon is  
expanding the sense of the importance of what is generated in the  
avant reaches of culture during times of transition. There is no room  
for benign passivity in this vision. Benny's passivity is at the  
center of a lot of pain, invoking the suffering aspect of Buddhism  
without the mindful  joy and awakened state of peace. I find myself  
sympathetic but with zero admiration; he embodies the passivity that  
empowers imperial  greed and violence and  and tends toward personal  
impotence and self destruction.

We find out in the second part of this  Chapter that the alligator  
was Stencil. Apparently managing to escape in the darkness following  
the shot.  Ah the dangers of investigative research. Stencil is  
connected to the great games afoot, but he is also looking for the  
truth of his Father's life. If we look back to the Egyptian mythology  
again, Stencil is aligned with Set (Stencil minus cil) and  is  
animated by  the principle of un-killable darkness, wildness,  the  
desert.  Both in Winsome's weird connection to a plot to foster an  
nuclear attack on Moscow, Mafia's racism and exploitation in the name  
of personal liberation, and in this near killing we are beginning to  
see that the whole sick crew contains serious rifts, that the  
humanity of friendship is not enough to prevent even the mildest  
attempt at creating a counter-culture from becoming the seedbed of   
violence.  Profane has been seduced into imagining large alligators,  
( the largest confirmed sighting was 2 feet) and that he is killing  
them to prevent an equally imaginary threat.   He ends up more  
frightened of actual sex  with a smart kind and attractive woman than  
spending his days shooting things in a sewer.

Stencil represents the foundation of resistance through understanding  
how things got to be this way , the analysis side of analysis and  
prescription( in the tradition of  Marx, Jesus,  Gautama Buddha, Tom  
Paine, and Adam Smith). Maybe that is too  naive. Does Stencil  
represent a necessary  foundation of resistance or the delusion of  
cause and effect?  Can self-reflection bring about  change in  
direction ? Can humans by any means resist the pervasive juggernaut  
of the paradigm of war?  For Stencil it is not his analysis that is  
most potent in this pursuit , but his empathy with the dispossessed  
and the untamed.

I don't actually think Pynchon has resolved these questions within  
himself, but they are the logical questions of a post religious world  
view and Pynchon is determined to `be our Stencil, our Virgil our  
Beatrice  and to force us to reckon honestly with our profane  
versions of Hell, Heaven and  worlds between. The reader finds him or  
herself wondering is any experience  spiritually transformative, any  
love divine? I think Pynchon mostly  leaves that as the door  
untaken;  the closest we get to Beatrice is the tragically failed  
union of feminine and masculine which is  great romance at the center  
of the wild world, the deep  and palpable sadness in Malta and  
Manhattan, Egypt,  Europe and Southwest Africa. The subject of the  
next chapter.

I think that about does it for me on CH 5 of V.