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

[Mark Kohut]

Yes...I would still rather read V. again than most new novels or most
from its time..

Here is a 'piling-on' argument I'll make, taken from a misc. book I've been
reading, which led me to go back to the origins of Schlemiel which I posted.
The original book. I think, knowing a bit about Pynchon that he is using 
some meanings more from that original book than the Howe, Bellow, Malamud,
Singer and Roth's do. [Very successful Jewish law firm handling literary cases]

From English translation of Gassett's Revolt of the Masses. 1930. Norton. 
This Spanish philosopher is exploring the crisis in Europe: 
"The European stands alone, without any living ghosts by his side; like Peter
Schlemiel he has lost his shadow."

P'raps Pynchon wants to 'say' that the half-Jewish Benny has lost (half-of) his 
shadow. 

No ghosts to help him. No human tradition. 

We know how important the concept of the shadow---mostly from Jung?---was to 
become 

to TRP and how important ghosts in America---or their loss---were to become...

I am still arguing that this is some part of V. that doesn't work per TRP's own 
critique
of the way fiction fails in Slow Learner: "If you start with an idea first...."

 


----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Mon, January 10, 2011 5:54:45 PM
Subject: Re: V---2nd, Chap 13, still.....on Schlemielness.

13 seems to fit in with the MG and the Pig's motorcycle and Shroud.
Rachel O fucks her car and Benny says this turned him into a Schmuck
or a Putz who is, in competing with the MG, a loser and doomed to
failure, fearful of female sexual power and the power they have to
organize and produce young that he will be obliged to Provide for,
ands so he is talking it out with his mechanical friend or mate while
dreaming of electric ladies or something. Yeah, it seems like IV to
me, only better because P is so young. I would guess he wrote this
kinda stuff when he was in college.  Kinda heavy on the ideas, though
the ideas are juvenile and shallow, taken from books like Adams but
not given much of a spin. A strong reader has a tough time with this
chapter; it is the weakest in the book. But, the fact that young P is
trying, as he notes in SL, to write from the novel voices, black and
Jewish writers and so on,  helps us understand his development. No?

On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 5:22 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
>
>
>