V-2nd - 2: Stencil

[alice wellintown]

TSI, as others have noted, is in part, a parody of Twain's HF, and it
features a black man, not Jim but a jazz man and the whole sick crew
(the boyz). The key to the tale is the black boy the boyz make,
construct, like a robot ...from the castaway and renegades. This
imagined lad, constructed as P describe the process in his luddite
essay, could get at the truth that only romance and never history can
hit on. but the boyz cast him away. but before they do he has an
impact; the boyz begin to quesstion the adult world, its politics, its
racist terror, its systems of education and indoctrination, its cold
war, its rockets.

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 1:21 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I, for one, like working the Ulysses echoes......
>
> Here's one simple-minded way that V. differs from it--and
> from those early stories (inclu. The perhaps-best--nods to alice--The Secret
> Integration
> and then those he got published in a minor major way: Under the Rose,
> Mortality & Mercy in Vienna------History enters. He becomes an historical
> novelist
> (an anti-historical Romance novelist--nods to Alice).
>
> That's what V. has......the past....
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
> To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Thu, July 8, 2010 10:07:57 AM
> Subject: Re: V-2nd - 2: Stencil
>
> a) the clocks, all the clocks, I've seen one with a twisting pendulum
> like that, somewhere...
>
> b) continuing with my Ulysses-V. comparison, U of course tightens up
> Aristotle's unities and all occurs in one day, whereas V. takes place
> over, umm, a longer period of time...shoot, anybody aware of a
> timeline for it somewhere - I know it starts on Christmas Eve...
>
> c) nose job as a diaspora of the flesh (Esther getting away from an
> ancestral profile)
> Rachel on page 46: "The girl [Paola] lived proper nouns.  Persons,
> places.  No things.  Had anyone told her about things?  It seemed
> Rachel had had to do with nothing else.  The main one now being
> Esther's nose."
> Reification, thingification: rather than being part of Esther (she's
> disowning it in its present form), it's become a thing.  (Profane
> meanwhile is experiencing people's love of things as a secret as big
> to him as V. to Stencil?)
>
>
> d) Henry Adams was a scion of the famous Adams family, and I got up to
> his time in Germany before losing my copy, his grandfather was huge in
> Boston and national politics, his uncle (Fester) was also some kind of
> bigwig, and his father (Gomez) was a diplomatic envoy to the Court of
> St James (England) right during the outbreak of the Civil War, and I
> guess was trying to pull England over to the North's side, right?  And
> had some success, something to do with ships and blockades and actions
> contemplated by Parliament in favor of the South that were not
> consummated...
> But the cool thing about Adams was how, although he served as his
> father's private secretary during these negotiations, he like was NOT
> fascinated by the Great Game but much more so by his own personal
> emotions and impressions...so that he can register world events
> faithfully, not as a cipher, but as someone who's just as interested -
> actually more so - in a completely different, personal interpretation
> ("you are not what the Caesars say you are" (GR))
> ...in suchlike manner Stencil's dad was playing the Great Game, but
> Stencil himself, although finding sustenance among the diplomatic
> corps ("to whom family still meant something") also does NOT find
> himself playing secret agent on any discernible team - but instead
> pursues the Greater Game of drawing some personal meaning out of life
> by combining a hint in his father's diary with a diverse set of
> experiences...
> -- some kind of a Goedelian quirk if we consider politics as Brigadier
> Pudding's "Things that can happen", taking the place of Russel's
> painstaking arithmetic, and Stencil's V. thesis as an unsolvable
> proposition within it...
>
>
> e) spoiler? probably not for anybody reading this, but still...
>
>
>
>
> ...at the end where Benny says he hasn't learned a goddam thing,
> should we relate that to the Education theme?
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Yippy dippy dippy,
> Flippy zippy zippy,
> Smippy gdippy gdippy, too!
> - Thomas Pynchon ("'Zo Meatman's Gone AWOL")
>
>
>
>