BE and V.

[Fiona Shnapple]

Why go under the street, into the sewer.? Into the toilet? Down the toilet?
Well, Modernism. Sure, Freudian. Subconscious or Unconscious. The
fascination and fear of the unconscious, of what is under consciousness, is
a dominant artistic concern/structure of Modernism. As early as V.,
however, P begins to mix in what critics have called, well lots of things,
but mostly post-modernism, his undermining or under minding of modernist
expectations and conventions. McHale, for example, reads the opening of GR
as a model of Modern readers reading postmodern texts in pluralized zones
zapped. A quick check into Tanner, yeah, good stuff on sewers and language
and epiphanies and the American Mystery, or easier, Grant's Guide to
V....these may disabuse anyone of the abuse they may subject themselves to
in the quest for the white goddess of V or an Education that has any worth
in a Post-Adams West.


But, why go underground with Benny and Stencil? Freud? Jung? Brown? Parody?
Of Adams? Of Joyce and Bergson and James and the Moderns, of Freud, of
Brown, of Young, of Graves, of.....Sure.

But there is more to P than this. Norman O Brown and all that shit,
including, of course, Brown on language, the magical incantations and
names, in silence, in waiting for, in the waste, the miracle. The Crying,
the tossing of Lots, of Lot's / Lost wages. Brown spends a lot of time, as
Marx does, with what he sees as a bad Turn, There is the turn from Freud to
Fromm and Jung, the Neo Freudians. This, along with the Devil, Luther, the
Privy and the Protestant Devil of Black Shit is all very golden to Catholic
Pynchon who, it seems, remains a materialist, an author who rejects the
ideas in favor of the forces, much lower, not in the mind, but in the lower
and nether parts. So, Like Marx, who does the same with Hegel, and rejects
the ideas for the the roots, for the forces of the workers, of production.
This is what P writes about.

Show Biz Kids meet Side Show Blob.

All that ambiguity of parables allusively entangled in history. Sure. That
too.

But Benny goes down there cause it's work. A job with all those preterit
bums, the waste nobody wants, with his co-worker Angel because he thinks he
needs a job, or somebody convinces him to get one. He volunteers. Why?
Cause he needs a job? Get a J O B. Why? Has he got dependents, really. If
it's just so P can get him under the street, why...he can keep Benny on the
subway yo-yo trip. But he has to hunt. He needs Angel. He needs Stencil
too.

Not that they are exactly Organized Labor, but the Material forces are at
work, as in every P novel. Now, they can be Freudian. Freud had them, the
sub or un conscious is under the street so to speak. But since it's work
down there, it's also about what Marx does with Materialism.

Basic stuff from WIki

Historical materialism started from a fundamental ***underlying reality***
of human existence: that in order for human beings to survive and continue
existence from generation to generation, it is necessary for them to
produce and reproduce the material requirements of life.
Marx's criticism of Hegel asserts that Hegel's dialectics go astray by
dealing with ideas, with the human mind. Hegel's dialectic, Marx says,
inappropriately concerns "the process of the human brain"; it focuses on
ideas. Hegel's thought is in fact sometimes called "dialectical idealism,"
a misleading term that would be more descriptive if changed to "dialectical
ideaism" (spelled without the *l*). Marx believed that dialectics should
deal not with the mental world of ideas but with "the material world," the
world of production and other economic activity.
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