V ch. 5 part 2 Imaginary Alligators, Real buckshot

[Mark Kohut]

Kindly Kudos for fine hosting with a finish that more than makes up for that 
late start (as IF you even had to 'make up' anything)

Thanks.


 


----- Original Message ----
From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thu, August 19, 2010 11:18:41 AM
Subject: V ch. 5 part 2 Imaginary Alligators, Real buckshot

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.