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

[Mark Kohut]

This is the best argument for what I should be
remembering as Benny in the book I'll grant you that.
And you might have it.

I still am bothered by the self-consciousness of Benny about it all.

Yeah, doing Roth is not his shtick....
but creating from abstractions is still a fault if the characters 
don't feel real.....in 13, Benny doesn't to me...................

and, he does save Paola and drive Pig away---which he has to think about for
weeks to understand?---and does accept "dependents" responsibly
and yet Rachel excoriates him AND he will soon claim to have learned nothing.

Either a lot of confused unreliabilty or confused character creation from my 
read....

 


----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Mon, January 10, 2011 1:19:47 PM
Subject: Re: V---2nd, Chap 13, still.....on Schlemielness.

Remember, Profane is half Jewish (Benny and parody of Job) and half
Italian (Profane Roman Catholic and parody of Prometheus).  The self
condemnation is Catholic guilt? Catholic sexual repression and
guilt--those condoms he hangs on the doors are clearly Jewish and
Catholic.  He is also, and more importantly, a parody of the American
Hero or all that rugged individualism, go West and Manifest, On the
Road and Wandering Scholar (American style--the navy) stuff that
Pynchon describes in his SL Introduction, characteristics that are
both invested in him in parodic ways, like his less than super-human
resourcefulness and failure at independent masculinity (Bumpo,
Queequeq & Ishmael, RPM), which of course, P reads, in the SL essay
anyway, as the immature American Male who won't grow up and commit.
Benny is, like many a Romance figure, invested with all manner of
paradox and contradiction, subversion of binaries and weaving of lines
and hemp fast to a quest not his own. So, although P may fail to write
a Jewish figure as Roth or the better Roth does, he doesn't actually
try to. It's not his shtick.