V---2nd

[Mark Kohut]

No, not suggesting a tacky moral...




________________________________
From: redcomrad <redcomrad at zoho.com>
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Fri, January 21, 2011 5:51:10 PM
Subject: Re: V---2nd


Are you suggesting that the author has tacked a moral on to Benny? Or is it that 
the author has tacked on an idea at the end of the work; an idea he has, 
perhaps, failed to show and thus needs to tell? An idea about fiction? Has the 
idea something to do with the reader and the fictionality of fiction or 
characters? Certainly the lady(s) V and all that we learn about her story and 
her/his history is, if parodic and ironic, is not a character we learn a damn 
thing about, for she remains a mystery as she must, even as we learn too much 
about her story and her history/mystery. Can't recall Chase or Booth, but I 
doesn't Twain's novel warn the reader not to tack a moral on to the tale? 
Huckleberry doesn't learn a damn thing either. Perhaps that's too rigid? He, 
like Benny, like Stencil like Henry Adams, learns a whole bunch of things. He 
learns that he can't dress up like no girl and fool no woman cause she gonna see 
how he throws and catches.  He does learn that Jim has a man, a father with a 
daughter and that Jim beat his daughter and now feels grief and guilt for 
beating her. He knows Jim's theory about language and the origins of the stars 
aint no match for his own theory. But he never does figure out, even after Jim 
risks his freedom and his black skin to protect and save Tom, that Jim ain't one 
exceptional nigger out of the whole bunch who is still, still should ever 
be, lower than Pap, the property of another person who has every right to own 
him. He never does navigate that moral fork in the river. He ain't really 
learned a god damned thing niether. He's just a boy. Benny, well, he's...as 
Pynchon sez, an American male. 



---- On Fri, 21 Jan 2011 06:23:52 -0500 Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote 
---- 



Soon we will get to the famous and oft-quoted by us even 
>part of V. where Benny proclaims he has learned nothing. 
>
>Some scholars and commentators on the novel in general' 
>have focussed on that sayin' it is one of the novel's weaknesses 
>'cause in good novels the character 'develops".... 
>
>Leaving aside Benny's reliability with that remark, I have read this 
>from Richard Chase, that afore-mentioned definer of romance vs. 
>the novel and teacher of Wayne Booth, of The Rhetoric of Fiction: 
>
>"Characters in American fiction who seem to be, because of their 
>situation and prospects. candidates for initiation do not usually change much 
>under the pressure of what happens to them".............. 
>
>This in his chapter on Twain specifically on Huck Finn and he gives other 
>examples....he says when the author says they have changed it usually 
>sounds like 'a moral' tacked on................................ 
>
>So, if the Benny part of V. is about Benny's 'initiation' it is in a grand 
>tradition. 
>
>
>
>
>



      
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