V-2nd - Chapter 10, Part III: 20 days before the Dog Star ...

[kelber at mindspring.com]

An odd insert after the Profane-not-sleeping-with-Mafia scene (too much integrity?):

"Twenty days before the Dog Star moved into conjunction with the sun, the dog days began.  The world started to run more and more afoul of the inanimate." (p. 316)

Pynchon then lists various mass deaths around the world, drawing the data from an Almanac disasters list.  What I find odd about the list is the fact that he includes both human brushes with the man-made inanimate (train wrecks, building collapses) with deaths caused by Nature (tidal waves, tropical storms).  So here, Nature is inanimate.  That's a very different view from the Partridge in a Pear tree metaphor a few pages earlier.  There, Nature is romantic, self-renewing until it encounters the evil that is Man.  Here, hapless Man suffers at the hands of Nature.  Earlier, inanimate crash dummies SHROUD and SHOCK suffered mutilation and dismemberment at the hands of Man.  Here, inanimate man-made objects return the favor.

At first, the list seems to be telling us that Death (gasp!)is BAD.  Nothing very profound there.  But, along with the Partridge and crash dummies, the list tells us that there's No Difference between the animate and inanimate, the natural and unnatural.  All are subject to entropy and to the laws of the Universe as represented by the predetermined movement of the Dog Star [don't think Pynchon's indulging in astrology here; the image recalls his earlier Sun-as-yoyo image in Chapter 1].

If the natural and the human and the natural-inanimate and manmade-inanimate are all the same, all made of the same "stuff" of the universe, whence Profane's terror of the inanimate?  Is it a silly human prejudice, pretending that inanimate objects are different from us.  Profane doesn't seem overly fond of Nature either (he prefers a job in the city to one in the stix), but doesn't seem terrified either.

Pynchon seems to be playing around with the similarities and differences of animate and inanimate in this chapter; possibly trying to ferret out his own attitudes as well.  Aside from Vera's prosthetic eyeball, Chapter 9 didn't focus so much on the clash of these two conditions.  From here on in, that clash takes center stage.

LK