V-2nd - Farewell to Chapter 6

[kelber at mindspring.com]

I don't disavow the book, though I recoil from such things as Benny's musings about whether Fina wants or deserves a gang-bang.  I was 18 when I first read the book, and I absolutely loved it.  Don't recall recoiling from any of it.  Either Benny's attitudes were more in keeping with the (creeps) I knew (though I don't think so), or I was the perfect audience for young Pynchon. I accepted Benny's/Pynchon's attitudes at face value, and oddly, didn't care, perhaps because I was as naive about these things when I read the book as Pynchon was when he wrote it. I disagree, Mike, that Pynchon was deliberately trying to make us dislike Benny, or at least, trying to show us how flawed Benny was.  I found Benny's yoyoing and rootlessness, and everything else about him, completely cool at that young age, and I'm guessing Pynchon did too.  I'm sure he recoils along with the rest of us now.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
>Sent: Sep 14, 2010 1:19 AM
>To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: V-2nd - Farewell to Chapter 6
>
>egads, is it 7 already?  time to make the donuts...
>
>working backward in order to work forward, Benny's sickening behavior
>is not (I'd say, in my finite wisdom) just an excrescence of
>post-adolescent cleverness on the part of the author, but a deliberate
>and well-written depiction of the sort of failure that he's trying to
>depict...
>
>...all too well-depicted, I'd say (from my amateur viewpoint), in that
>just about all our readership (and we *like* Pynchon) recoil from the
>text and disavow the book...
>
>there's a phrase in a Wayne Dyer book, or one of those guys (yes, I
>read self-improvement books - in my defense, a friend put me onto that
>one), where he says something like, "Don't cut off my finger, look
>where I'm pointing!"
>
>who's that drummer guy, in _Vineland_, who talks about, "That's what I
>do, take the rude buffets of life and give them a beat" or something
>like that?