Gold, Man, Sax and Violins CH 6 V-2

[Joseph Tracy]

There is a description by someone who met Pynchon where the writer  
explains how he writes by comparing his technique to one of those  
medical anatomy text  images with the multilayerered  transparencies  
showing the circulatory system, muscles bones etc. I think this  
chapter is a layer in a complex portrait of the colonized, focusing  
on the roles of sex, money and violence.  It is prefaced by the the  
description of Father Fairing's rat parish, by Benny's adoption into  
a Puerto Rican community, and by  a portrait of the powerful lusts of  
a propagandist for colonial dominance and racism who clearly  
represents Ayn Rand.  It converges with Stencils quest in the persona/ 
rat named Veronica.

It is interesting that the whole alligator biz is thrown into  
question by  the following passage:
	"The other two introduced themselves, Lucille came back up the stoop  
to sit next to Profane, Geronimo went off for more beer. Angel 			 
continued to sing. "What do you guys do," Lucille said.
      	I tell tall stories to girls I want to screw, Profane thought.  
He scratched his armpit. "Kill alligators," he said.
      	"Wha."
             He told her about the alligators; Angel, who had a  
fertile imagination too, added detail, color. Together on the stoop  
they hammered 		together a myth. "

How real are the alligators? Is this a story they are telling  
others?, a story they are telling themselves? Pynchon is telling us  
to think of this whole puerto Rican section not mainly as reliable  
narrative but  a commentary on something else, a satire . West Side  
Story is the obvious target. Something about the way gang rivalries  
become the field for a "fresh" interpretation of Romeo and Juliet  
reminds me a little of Benny the  schlemiel who never really gets to  
"know"  the Puerto Ricans and  sees them through his non  
shakespearean but equally  clueless, non-comittal and ultimately   
passively indifferent  point of view. But there is something about  
this West side that is more oily, sexually charged, meaty, crowded,  
random, drunk, pathetic and touched by human kindness and sympathy  
than WSS.

Power roles, gender roles,  sexual and other appetites and  colonial  
belief systems appear as part of the dynamic throughout this chapter.

"It was a desire he got, off and on, to be cruel and feel at the same  
time sorrow so big it filled him, leaked out his eyes and the holes  
in his shoes to make one big pool of human sorrow on the street"....

"Like tinsel suddenly tossed on a Christmas tree, the merry twinkling  
of switchblades, tire irons and filed-down garrison belt buckles  
appeared among the crowd in the street. The girls on the stoop drew  
breath in concert through bared teeth. They watched eagerly; as if  
each had kicked in on a pool for who'd draw first blood."

It occurred to him that somewhere - when he was drunk, too horny to  
think straight, tired - he'd signed a contract above the paw-prints  
of what were now alligator ghosts. Almost as if there had been this  
agreement, a covenant, Profane giving death, the alligators giving  
him employment: tit for tat. He needed them and if they needed him at  
all it was because in some prehistoric circuit of the alligator brain  
they knew that as babies they'd been only another consumer-object,  
along with the wallets and pocketbooks of what might have been  
parents or kin, and all the junk of the world's Macy's.

It's all there in that Faustian arrangement: money, sex and violence.  
And it seems to me that it is set in opposition to commitment, love,  
family and marriage seen through Fina, her mother and that nuclear  
family..

  When Benny thinks that if Fina gets  gang raped she will have  
somehow asked for it , this reveals his acceptance and the widespread  
habit of blaming the victim, especially women. Basically whoever is  
lowest on the power-scale takes the blame( Think of Abu Graibh and go  
to Wikipedia to find a photo of , guess who - Lyndie England- as  
though she had set the whole thing up) .  I don't think we can take  
Benny's though  as Pynchon's attitude though I am also uncomfortable  
with the prurient aspect of P's  scenes with young women as objects  
of lust.  We are never sure if this is regarded as "fun" by him, but  
he is portraying something widespread and real and is not as a writer  
putting the blame for the imbalance on the young women.  In many ways  
this is a major theme and I think he is pointing toward the  
pornographic and self-interest  aspect of romantic fantasy . We see  
very little shared tenderness or caring  in V or Lot 49,  some in GR  
but mostly in the form of comradeship. We begin to see it in Vineland  
and by Mason and Dixon there has been a discernible change. There is  
still a lot of ambiguity in VL, M& D,  ATD and IV but for my money  
there is an important change.  What all of this does is force the  
reader to question and examine  the inherited  ideal model of  
romantic monogamy.  One thing Pynchon almost entirely avoids until  
Vineland  is child-rearing, and considering the breadth of his  
picture of the world this is  a rather glaring omission.  In GR it  
works better than in V because in war family is suspended.  Maybe  
this is what Pynchon is talking about more than any other single  
thing- the paradigm of War.