V2nd, once again a little different...

[Michael Bailey]

with apologies to alice and (I can't stress this too highly) mundo
caveat to the effect this is ONLY IN MY MIND

<[{(wherein he proves by algebra that just as Stephen rejected a whole
buncha stuff a bit more strenuously than he needed to and felt the
agenbite of inwit soothed by good ole Epps Cocoa from the Hand of
Bloom to his Mund (not Maul but Mund); so at the loutish (but not
swinish) hand of BP, good ole Stencil gets infused in his Quest with
the rich chocolaty goodness of mesmeric young animal spirits...)}]>


Well now, by this time we've met young Benny,
adept in the doldrums of 1955 in New York City and newly adrift from
the Navy and for a bit longer from his family, having never really had
a clue
and not pretending to one...

(young Stephen, schooled in the drear dearness of dirty disillusioned
Dublin and having renounced family, creed, nation, in order to lay
claim to an artist's identity, and beginning to realize the magnitude
of the task and feeling self-revulsion...
they are alike in self-disregard, and the stateliness and plumpness of
Buck Mulligan has nothing on the hairy grossness of Pig Bodine as a
foil for this personage... Pig is an exemplar of American decadence
next to whom Benny's defects are less pronounced,
In Ulysses, Buck Mulligan's sanguine fitting-in to the society, creed
and family ties that even Stephen can see has prospered Mr Mulligan
better than his own renunciation of them (and he's paying rent to
Buck, and behind on it...), that his rainbow of art and culture that
he's chasing, lonely, drunken, impoverished, is also visible from much
more comfortable quarters...but yet one finds oneself rooting for
Stephen anyway...)

I won't pretend this is the main thing, or even a thing at all, that
Mr Pynchon is striving to do in V.
But the emotional house that _Ulysses_ built, that landmark of
uncreated conscience half-created, lingers in this reader's mind, and
new reading swirls around those half-finished walls and eventually
settles in them, if it's compatible - V. is surprisingly compatible






-- 
Yippy dippy dippy,
Flippy zippy zippy,
Smippy gdippy gdippy, too!
- Thomas Pynchon ("'Zo Meatman's Gone AWOL")