V.-2 - 1: Yo-yoing versus free will

[Joseph Tracy]

helpful thoughts , this resonates. I have also noticed that Benny has  
this desire to avoid or rise above conflict, but he has a pattern of  
serving it: the navy, the crocodiles, the Playboys and Fina.   The 2  
inanimate objects used as examples are Rachel and her MG and the dude  
who wants to kill Arabs and his machine gun.  Freedom of movement   
and the power of superior weaponry. Benny  as you say wants to avoid  
this distasteful embrace of the inanimate ends up with a kind of  
pointless repetition of movement and  shooting  suicidal crocs with a  
double barrel shotgun.

I think Pynchon fails to give us a credible sense of why women get so  
interested in Profane. Perhaps credibility is pointless in this domain.
On Jun 14, 2010, at 11:33 PM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> The paranoia in GR stems, in part, from terror of The Bomb - Death  
> From Above - as represented by the parabola.  In V., Benny  
> Profane's consumed with terror of the mechanistic, the inanimate.   
> He continually finds himself on a rigid, pre-determined yo-yo path,  
> back and forth along the east coast, back and forth on the ferry,  
> or on the 42nd Street shuttle.  It's hard to know the exact source  
> of his (or Pynchon's) anxiety about the inanimate. Is it the  
> nascent fear of the military-industrial complex that crops up more  
> explicitly in his later books?  Or does it stem from the mood of  
> the times, when new-improved Space Age Technology was on everyone's  
> mind (particularly emphatic, no doubt, at Boeing Aircraft), the  
> term cyborg had just been coined in terms of engineering humans for  
> long-term space travel, etc.?
>
> Nowadays, Benny's fear of being in a close relationship with the  
> inanimate (such as Rachel was with her car)seems particularly  
> prescient, as our computers and phones become less like tools and  
> more like prostheses.  Was Pynchon picking up on this futuristic  
> vibe when he reported to work at Boeing each day?
>
> If Benny's a yo-yo, with no ability to control his own destiny,  
> what's Paola?  On the face of it, she has no freedom.  She's  
> trapped on the lowest rungs of society, completely dependent on men  
> to take her away from wherever she is. She briefly gets trapped in  
> yo-yo mode when she takes a ferry ride with Benny, but she's able  
> to break free.  Although she's dependent on Men, she's free to  
> choose which man, which path, and she never returns.  She marries  
> Pappy Hod to get from Malta to America, she's "cast loose at her  
> own whim" from the marriage, considers and rejects the offer of  
> passage to the west coast by Pig Bodine, opting instead to go up  
> the coast to NYC with Benny.  She ditches him later (or vice  
> versa?).  He opts for the machine-loving Rachel instead.
>
> Paola (or all of Malta?) experiences free will in ways that Benny  
> and Rachel never can.  Is she a stand-in for the colonized (not  
> free, but possessing non-industrialized culture)?  Something to  
> keep in mind later when we get to the chapter about her father and  
> Malta.  At the time Pynchon was writing V., Malta was still a  
> British colony.
>
> Laura