Fwd: BE and V.

[Mark Kohut]

So, in a much less full way, I remember some lines about the soullessness (a summarizing word) of New York City and there is Benny's lostness within in that indicted it then.....and is ratcheted up as if on steroids in BE...




On Tuesday, December 10, 2013 7:57 PM, Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:
  






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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