V ch. 5 part 2 Imaginary Alligators, Real buckshot

alice wellintown alicewellintown at gmail.com
Thu Aug 19 11:48:14 CDT 2010


That about does do it. Thanks

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 12:18 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> 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.
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