a euphemism... Real Scars

[alice wellintown]

>> In other words, are we meant to accept the passage at face value?

Not if reading at face value in this instance means reading Vibe's address
to LAHDIDA and believing that this character would make this speech to this
audience.

One way to look at this passage is through the lens of the critic James
Wood or thru the lens of Professor Thomas Foster, that is, to look at
HOW the passage works or HOW to read it like a pro. I only mention these
two because P-Listers brought them up and they will do the job. And, Booth
& Frye & Bloom are so old school anyway, and who reads those guys anymore.
Who reads anything anymore is the rub, opr the question, or the infinte
jest we are so bothered by...so why bother to dream that perchance others
will?

Now, my experience with the P-List makes both of these appraoches kinda
silly, as the readers here, the older and wiser ones, the ones that are
older and wiser than  Zadie Smith, certainly, and probably older and wiser
than Jonathan Franzen, , don't need no warm euphamistic
excrement splattered on their pages, not pages really, not ink,
but vatic pixels on the wall/screen.

 In doing so we may not come to any consensus about its value; perhaps
there is some gold in that stream of warm excrement; perhaps it is a dirty
bomb tossed at the reader, or at the targets the reader wants so
desperately to bomb; perhaps it is but one more example of what Zadie
Smith, in defense of Pynchon & Co.,  calls the over-examined
postmodernists, a reduction of their waning project to a fascinating
failure, to works of intellectual brinkmanship that have no heart.

Perhaps Pynchon fails here because he wants to; he deliberately launches a
political attack on our postmodern robber barons by giving this speech
to his bad character, a fictional robber baron from the industrial robber
baron decades in American history, and then, he undermines by cartooning
the character and his address. If we've read this far we are older and
wiser than  Zadie Smith; we know about the bad shit, the warm stream of
excrement that flows, straight, linear, stripes across the backs of
workers...how Dixon was moved to anger, but took such pleasures feasting on
the black flesh of his transit from a coal skiff to a royal society
servant. We know, and this address fails to teach, to move, to tell, to
show. A major writer, so Nabokov says in his lecture, is first, an
enchanter.

So, how does the passage work? Unpack the heartless like a whore with a
painted face, a puppet, a maypole?

Yes. Pynchon, Pynchon insists, isn't quite in the history books or on the
map. Sure, we know, the reader knows, that Pynchon is referencing the
robber barons of the indiustrial period and our own, even if we disagree
withis characterization of the postmodern barons as robbers opr barons.

 From what we know of Vibe and the story thus far, and we are deep into it
at this point, this speech doesn't make sense on the face of it. And, there
are lots of clues to tell us how to read this, some of them in the first
chapter, but many more as we read on, so by page 1000 we cannot possibly
take this passage at face value.

Why would Vibe admit that he abuses and exploits, fucks the workers and
then ask why he shouldn't do so? Well, consider the source and the
audiance. No, you can't dig it out of history. It aint on the map.

How does it work? It is only a rhetorical device, of course, a
question Vibe uses to achieve his purpose: to answer it with more
outragous, inflamatory, callous characterizations of his abuse and the
nature of the class he fucks, to win the affinity of his audiance. Who are
they? Who is listening to this steam of blasphemism bereft of euphemisms.
This straigh talk. This warm excrement.

And, how does this speech muddy the waters of the radicals who use violent
means to attack Vibe & Co.?

Those who love to toss a bomb on our barons who rob us of our labor?
Like those in VL (BV), this book's bad guys are not done in by the workers.
And the workers, like the Gates Family, the Traverse Family, are far
from lambs slaughtered by wolves in business suits.

There is politics of individuals, and revenge, not defense of America, of
her workers.

And Vibe is a cartoon; his talk is nothing a robber baron would say, then,
now, or in a fiction that rakes mud. The onlooker, the substitute, is
little more than a melodramatic cartoon as well.

Money will beget money. No, warm excrement.
And in the end, there was only the word.
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