V---2nd, Chap 13, still.....on Schlemielness.

[alice wellintown]

Complex figure, but in early P Benny is a symbol of work and religion.
His shooting the gator is the key. It's the moment of crisis, he must
act, do the job right, prove that a Jew works, a Jew bleeds, a Jew is
a Man, an American Man even, but some mysteries, some spiritual gift,
a revelation of parodic invesrions flips his toast.

Since Jewry’s attitudes towards its own frailty were complex
and contradictory, the Schlemiel was sometimes berated for
his foolish weakness, and elsewhere exalted for his hard
inner strength. For the reformers who sought ways for
strengthening and improving Jewish life and laws, the
Schlemiel embodied those negative qualities of weakness that
had to be ridiculed to be overcome. Conversely, to the
degree that Jews looked upon their disabilities as external
afflictions, sustained through no fault of their own, they
used the Schlemiel as the model of endurance, his innocence
a shield against corruption, his absolute defenselessness
the only gaurenteed defense against the brutalizing
potential of might.
     Ruth Wisse    “The Schlemiel as Modern Hero”

Switch the dialects, alter a few details, and most black
jokes can become Jewish Jokes or Irish Jokes with a minimum
of loss…When a Schlimazel’s bread-and butter accidentally
falls on the floor it always lands butter side down; with a
Schlemiel it’s much the same-except that he butters his
bread on both sides first.

    Sanford Pinsker    “The Schlemiel as Metaphor, Studies
in Yiddish and Jewish American Fiction”




On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 5:39 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Something else has been nagging me in reading and rereading V. that I finally
> self-articulated---"are you talking to me, ME?"---
>
> Schlemiel. Benny's self-understanding (and use) of.....
> To me, when heard and in my patchwork reading, I always thought Schlemiel
> meant bungler, hopeless incompetent....kinda a loveable loser....
>
> Which it does.........
> Never had I ever heard or read it as associated with the kind of selfishness and
> inability to love or commit
> that Benny sez of himself...after Rachel's evisceration of his inability to
> love.....
>
> Any others have Schlemiel associations to explain why?
>
> From wikipedia:
> In the story, Schlemiel sells his shadow to the Devil for a bottomless wallet,
> only to find that a man without a shadow is shunned by human society. The woman
> he loves rejects him, and he spends the rest of his life wandering the world in
> scientific exploration.
>
> The Yiddish word Schlemiel—and its Hebrew cognate Shlumi'el—mean a hopelessly
> incompetent person, a bungler. Consequently, the name is a synonym of one who
> makes a desperate or silly bargain.
>
>
>
>