V-2nd - Chap 8 / I have really never read this book this closely before

[Michael Bailey]

but in the spirit of Dr Umphrey at UCF (back when it was Florida
Tech), who used to sometimes spend a whole class period on one page,
it would be wrong to go on thinking that was all that could be said
about it.  Because there's a lot more to it than a simple
philosophical statement.

The narrator as much as tells us this isn't where Benny's going, so
perhaps it's wrong for us to go there.  A simple preference for the
animate over the inanimate doesn't determine an ethical system worthy
of prose as complex as that in which this story's couched, does it?

Of course not!  Schlemihl-hood (defined as "not getting along with the
inanimate", or even more paradoxically, "the quality of not being
liked [thereby imputing emotion, something traditionally associated
with the animate, to the inanimate] by inanimate objects" isn't
something BP celebrates.  Rather, he runs up painfully against its
limitations time after time.   He observes a more pan-sexual attitude
toward things in others, eg Rachel, and doesn't share in it.



> so the next paragraph modulates up chromatically and suggests (this is
> as deep philosophically as I think the book gets, at least in terms of
> breaking it down so even I can understand it) that the only valid
> reason to strive is to get laid, and that Benny qua Benny doesn't even
> crave anything besides the animate.  That is, he doesn't even think
> (our omniscient narrator assures us) about how all this craving could
> be sanely directed any other way.
> "Make love, not war" is implicit in his biogram, and his logogram
> doesn't extend to all that other stuff.
>

but to that, somebody in Dr Umphrey's class (or even the good Doctor
himself) would surely object that the narrator has taken pains to
delineate Benny's lot as not all that desirable; that it's the
narrator who makes the leap to a theory of history that makes
unfettered concupiscence the cause of Bad Things (war, rebellion)

And perhaps the intention here is to both evoke sympathy for Benny's
desire for animate warmth and to indicate some of the problems with
building a philosophical system upon it!