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

[Mark Kohut]

love the gloss here....yes, Death is bad (gasp!) and can come at any time in all 
kinds of ways is how I read this most....

So, in the midst of Death, find the animate and live! Maybe?...


----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sun, November 7, 2010 11:39:20 AM
Subject: V-2nd - Chapter 10, Part III:  20 days before the Dog Star ...

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