V2nd - Chapter 8 - Damn, damn...

[Michael Bailey]

"Rachel returned to Pig and Profane.  They were discussing Pappy Hod
and Paola.  Damn, damn, to herself, what have I brought him to?  What
have I brought him back to?"

aha, so she does think of herself as controlling Benny to some extent!

She really has enveloped him in her own circle of grace, just as Fina
did on the bus.

Fina's circle of grace to some extent depended on virginity and
chastity; Benny doesn't see any way to transcend that state of affairs
without breaking the circle of grace.  Can't extend, even in his
imagination, the grace of the moment on the bus to any salvational
vector beyond that moment....

For the purposes of a non-sectarian, or even agnostic, reading, shall
we think of the magnetic attraction of the possibility of
church-and-state-sanctioned marriage to either Fina or Rachel as a
sort of Magnetic North that a sentimental reader might be strongly
pulled towards, enabling us to posit that there is a cynosure or Pole
Star implicit in the text which guides the navigation of Benny?

I'm not of the faction that would see a dystopian black hole pulling
him stronger than any of his lovers...
although a case could be made...

I suppose a word here, "existentialism", might be something I could
use to try to elicit some responses:
Pig brought up Sartre's thesis that we're all impersonating an
identity, some pages back.

How relevant is the idea of existentialism to V.?   Does it shine any
light on Benny's rejection of most of the desirable possible
identities presented to him?
Is Stencil's attainment of versatility, his succession of guises, a
consummate expression of existential freedom?



-- 
- "After all, Salaam and Shalom are only slight different spellings of
 a word that means the same thing in Arabic and Hebrew.
Which translated into English means peace be upon you." - Norman Spinrad