V-2nd. Under the Street

[Scott Drake]

sure metaphor for the unconscious...but the sewer is also a material place that allows for and sustains the appearance of the urban street.  keeps the shit out, no?  if benny's descending into anything it is not simply his own individual unconscious, but the city's, which has a material form.  I mean benny actually goes down there it isn't fantasy in the novel, right?  the gators are tied into an economic order, bought first of all by kids from Macy's.  they are both the product of capitalism and its consumer because they inevitably feed on themselves (if the product becomes the waste--"Some had turned cannibal").  their required management by the Department sets up a kind of bureaucracy tasked with keeping the real effects of capitalist production ("or had fled in terror") from reaching the Street at the same time as it keeps "undesirables" (unemployed) visibly off the street?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Kohut" <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 27, 2010 6:06:29 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: V-2nd. Under the Street

Benny, who can never be at home on the Street, can perhaps hunt alligators under it. Metaphor for
the unconscious, the descent into-----Cf. Joe Campbell sez Grant of the Companion--- the psychic underbelly, the preterite feelings, so to speak? Or, as 
Tony Tanner adds....a parody of the Jungian descent into the dangerous, dream, fantasy underworld of the mind?   Where the artist must go.

Jump in w responses...the sewer is fine. 

Alligators are only native to America and China....but sometimes a baby alligator is just a wild creature that gets into sewers.