V ch. 5 part 2 Imaginary Alligators, Real buckshot

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Great analysis, Joseph.

Re: the sexism.  What can I say?  A passage like this makes me uncomfortable as a woman:

"At the moment she was naked and dangling a glowing brassiere before the frustrated claws of Fang who was Siamese, gray and neurotic. 'Bouncy, bouncy,' she was saying.  'Is the dweat big kitties angwy cause he tant play wif the bwa?  EEEE, he so cute and ickle.'"  Are Rand's ideas laughable on their own, or do they derive extra sneers because a woman is expounding on them?  Is young P, fresh out of the frat, so solidly a feminist, that we can take this passage to be a critique of sexist caricatures?  Frankly, the child molester and rat sodomizer were treated with less loathing, more sensitivity.

Moving on:

In the pre-New York Profane sequence, Profane's On The Street.  But it's here, below the street, that he meets Stencil.  The Whole Sick Crew's up above, and both Profane and Stencil are tunneling down beneath, looking for hidden meaning and encountering each other.  The answers to the questions of the day (war, imperialism, industrialism, inhumanity) are not to be found with the self-proclaimed intelligentsia, but in the hidden social underpinnings that literally prop them up.  

If Stencil is, in fact, the alligator, then he and Profane both share an amoebalike quality.  They have yet to find their final form.  They differ from the W.S.C. by their inability, or unwillingness to define themselves (as avant garde artist, writer, musician, etc.).  Even when Stencil talks about himself in the third person, he's analyzing his identity, not proclaiming it shallowly to the world.

Laura


-----Original Message-----
>From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>

>
>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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