Back to V., MB's structure post cont.

[Dave Williams]

Zoyd & Benny are interesting, but are not protagonists. They, like Larry, are parodies. 
 
Of what? 
 

The American Male is driven by something quite
deep in AMERICAN HISTORY to be a Hero (James Fenimore Cooper AND Davey Crocket). He is not only a boy inside, refusing to pay the price of any real relationship with
a real grown up person--have a family,  or grow up and get over
his losses, but also in love with being young and having
youthful qualities, with being innocent and pure of purpose, with
having a set of principles higher than the honor code of the society
at large, with having knowledge of his world that has been earned not
at college but on a whale ship or through deep intuition or from what
he has learned from the "Other", and a love of off-the-grid nature and
a distrust of life in the town or city, and with a quest to find
higher truths in TREES or NATURE or In The WOODS. In short, the
American male is a Romantic and yearns to remain so--singing the song
of myself.
 



--- On Fri, 9/3/10, Dave Williams <daveuwilliams at yahoo.com> wrote:


From: Dave Williams <daveuwilliams at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Back to V., MB's structure post cont.
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Date: Friday, September 3, 2010, 1:56 AM







or this one: 
 
Pynchon’s entire project of elucidating the allegory of the V is genre-related, as he places himself in the mythic and symbolic tradition of the romance-novel.  The novel as romance pursues “truth” in the surreal and at the edges of human experience.  Pynchon finds his insights at the interface between disciplines and the coming together of symbolic seams in the universe.  He looks for obscure incidents in history formed at the “interfaces” between cultures to find clues to the workings of the V.  Pynchon’s allegorical method fits well the conventions of the romance-novel that allow the novelist to go beyond the realm of ordinary reality in search of “truth.”
Pynchon hints in both V and Gravity’s Rainbow that he sees himself as continuing the tradition of Hawthorne and Melville.5  He may have Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Melville’s Moby Dick in mind as intertexts for his early novels.  As allegory, The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick offer problems of interpretation for characters and reader of what appear to be allegorical signs, opening a dialectic in which differing “readings” are available.  I would suggest that Thomas Pynchon found the allegorical complexity of Hawthorne useful as a model for his own allegory of the V6.
 
http://allegoriaparanoia.com/pynchon/early_stories/chapter1.html
 



      
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