Profane's disassembling dream dream?

[kelber at mindspring.com]

V. is all about terror of the inanimate, the mechanistic.  It seems to be related to the accompanying lack of free will, more than a developed critique of technology or the military-industrial complex.

Profane has this dream while in the act of yoyo-ing on the shuttle train.  The boy-within-the-joke-within-the-dream seeks help from a Haitian voodoo doctor to remove the oppressive gold screw from his stomach.  The cure ought to involve winding paths and natural objects - the antithesis of the mechanistic.  Instead, the boy's sent along an angular route to find artificially-decorated trees with an inanimate cure.  He discovers that there's no escape from the inanimate and mechanistic.  If he wants to be human (as in having an ass) he has to accept his lack of free will.

Farther down the page:  " ... if he [Profane] kept going down that street, not only his ass but also his arms, legs, sponge brain and clock of a heart must be left behind to litter the pavement ..."

If Profane continues down the street, exhibiting free will, he faces dissolution as a human being. It's a lousy choice:  free will and dissolution or submission to the mechanistic, the inanimate, the controlled. In GR, Slothrop chooses free will and dissolution.  Profane's afraid to make the choice, so he keeps yoyo-ing: go down the street, snap back.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Ron Judy <sem4phore at gmail.com>
>Sent: Jun 21, 2010 11:52 AM
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Profane's disassembling dream dream?
>
>Harper Perennial ed. p 39-40:
>
>"In this dream, he was all alone, as usual. Walking on a street at
>night where there was nothing but his own field of vision alive. It
>had to be night on that street. The lights gleamed unflickering on
>hydrants; manhole cover which lay around in the street. There were
>neon signs scattered here and there, spelling out words he wouldn't
>remember when he woke.
>  Somehow it was all tied up with a story he'd heard once, about a boy
>born with a golden screw where his navel should have been. For twenty
>years he consults doctors and specialists all over the world, trying
>to get rid of this screw, and having no success. Finally, in Haiti, he
>runs into a voodoo doctor who gives him a foul-smelling potion. He
>drinks it, goes to sleep and has a dream. In this dream he finds
>himself on a street, lit by green lamps. Following the witch-man's
>instructions, he takes two nights and a left from his point of origin,
>finds a tree growing by the seventh street light, hung all over  with
>colored balloons. On the fourth limb from the top there is a red
>balloon; he breaks it and inside is a screwdriver with a yellow
>handle. With the screwdriver he removes the screw from his stomach,
>and as soon as this happens he wakes from the dream. It is morning. He
>looks down toward his navel, the screw is gone. That twenty years'
>curse is lifted at last. Delirious with joy, he leaps out of bed, and
>his ass falls off.
>   To Profane, alone in the street, it would always seem maybe he was
>looking for something too to make the fact of his own dissassembly
>plausible as that of any machine. [... skipping paragraphs] This was
>all there was to dream; all there ever was: the Street."
>
>Things fall apart...An early foreshadowing of V.'s final disassembled
>demise...The screwdriver symbolism of the flaneur?
>
>What is the meaning of this dream within a dream?