V-2nd - Chapter 10: Partridge in a Pear tree

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Earlier on, I'd said in a post that Pynchon's later reverence for Nature isn't so evident in V.  Well, here's evidence to the contrary.  

In former Catatonic Expressionist Slab's latest painting, Cheese Danish No. 35, Slab thinks he's portrayed a perpetual motion machine:  a partridge in a pear tree.  "The partridge eats pears off the tree, and his droppings in turn nourish the tree which grows higher and higher, every day lifting the partridge up and at the same time assuring him a continuous supply of food."  It's a fully animate machine.  The problem for this machine isn't entropy, however, it's The Inanimate, specifically the man-made inanimate.  Slab's added a pointy-toothed gargoyle on which the partridge will inevitably be impaled, but he says it could just as well be a telephone wire an airplane or any other man-made object.

Obviously, Pynchon's having a laugh at Slab's expense - he doesn't understand entropy.  But there's still a hint of the romantic view of Nature as beautiful and self-renewing, until Man comes in and ruins everything.  No hint that Nature, via entropy or its own evils - lightening bolts, forest fires, soil erosion, mortality, is its own worst enemy.

This chapter is a treasure trove of the clash between the animate and the inanimate, and the frighteningly thin line (if any) between the two.  The Partridge is just the first of many puzzles Pynchon (via Benny) works through in this chapter.

Laura