V-2nd: He got there by

[Mark Kohut]

THE STREET tells the poignant, often heartbreaking story of Lutie Johnson, a young black woman, and her spirited struggle to raise her son amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork, The Street was Ann Petry's first novel, a beloved bestseller with more than a million copies in print. Its haunting tale still resonates today. 

I am not suggesting that TRP is alluding to this novel, just sent it to show how far back goes the sociological concept of The Street. It seems that sometime early in the 20th Century, book citations in a 40s Encyclopedia of Sociology have many that are capped, 'the abstract Street', rather than
lower-case. The Street gets reified. 
 
Streets are usually paved and are NOT the beach. 
 
Here is a typical Parisian Arcade....covered glass urban enclosure that might remind of a Crystal Palace collapsing if it did. Benny isn't happy on The Street.
  
View of an arcade (the passage Choiseul, located in the second arrondissement of Paris), as an example of the characteristic architecture of the covered arcades of 19th-century Paris.

 




----- Original Message ----
From: Heikki Raudaskoski <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Tue, June 22, 2010 4:34:08 PM
Subject: V-2nd: He got there by



"He got there by the way of the Arcade, ..." (Picador 9)
http://hamptonroads.com/2009/08/whats-name-norfolks-selden-arcade

I wouldn't be surprised if someone (Dave? Dave!) must've at some point
in the list history related this sentence to Benjamin's Arcades project.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project
(I recall having written of the flâneur etc. only in connection w/ GR -
the ever-so-boring-GR-loving Heikki.)

The arcades of Paris accentuate the fact that the environment where the
Baudelaurean/Benjaminesque flâneur strolls is inseparably an interior
and an exterior.
http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/flaneur.html
The flâneur is a free-wheeling, at once lazy and eager, spectator who
spots small, breathing meanings (porous interiorities) amidst the crowd
of arcadelike urbanity.

In V., the flâneur is divided into two: the exteriorized Benny with his
empty streets and the "entirely inward" (Picaror 55) directed Stencil.
Desolate exteriors with no meanings and airtight interiors with paranoid
meanings.

So it may not be so surprising that Benny "rounds the corner" and the
"East Main [is] on him" (Picador 10).


By making a turn at this corner, he performs, of course, a V.



Heikki