Work & the Black Messenger

[ish mailian]

In his "On Schlemiels in Thomas Pynchon’s “V” – Part II" Menachem
Feuer focuses out attention on Benny's "depression" as he looks for
work. In a section titled " The Schlemiel’s Epiphany," Feuer writes:

The Schlemiel’s Epiphany

Immediately following this reflection, Pynchon places Profane in an
employment office marking his isolation and awkwardness. He is alone
and “didn’t see Fina.” It’s as if his mother dropped him off. After
filling out his employment application, something of an epiphany
occurs by way of an African-American “holy messenger.” He wears a
similar jacket to the one Profane usually wears (a black suede one):
“As he handed the competed form to a girl at the desk, a messenger
came through: A Negro wearing an old suede jacket….and for a second
his eyes and Profane’s met” (157).

Profane reflects on the mystical messenger and has an epiphany:

Maybe Profane had seen him under the street of at one of the shapeups.
But there was a little half-smile and a kind of half-telepathy and it
was as I this messenger had brought a message to Profane too, sheathed
to everybody but the two of them in an envelope of eyebeams touching,
that said: Who are you trying to kid? Listen to the wind. (157)

The fact that “he listened to the wind” suggests something prophetic
about this epiphany. It announces a new moment in Profane’s life. And
this is marked when, after the messenger leaves the room, he goes to
the window and has a vision of the wind and his new, changed life.
Now, it seems, he is truly free:

It was as if he could see the wind, too. The suit felt wrong on him.
Maybe it was nothing after all to conceal this curious Depression
which showed up in no stock market year-end report. ‘Hey, where are
you going’, said the receptionist. ‘Changed my mind,’ Profane told
her. Out in the hall and going down in the elevator, in the lobby and
in the street, he looked for the messenger, but couldn’t find him. He
unbuttoned the jacket of old Mendoza’s suit and shuffled along
Forty-Second Street, head down, straight into the wind. (157-58)

A book can be written on the wind in Pynchon novels, but I'm
interested in this encounter, this epiphany. The advice, to listen to
the wind is a far more important idea than the one that critics have
fixated on, the Keep Cool but Care, and though the two are related, to
work of course, the gig of the jazzman's cool message, as Dinerstein
discusses it at some length in his Origins of Cool book evolves,
though that look in the eye, as Dinerstein describes it from Miles, so
key to the cool, in any event, the Black Messenger in BE has lost his
job, and here the messenger in V. provides the cool, the Black Man is
always in a depression in the employment sense of it. When is
unemployment ever not what half the household is?

A few have noted the similarities of the Black Messenger in V. and the
Black Messenger in BE.
Why Black Messengers?

Unemployment and the Cool of that Gig that is in the wind if you listen.

And Benny, Pynchon here, he listening.




posted earlier, but here is the link again:
http://www.berfrois.com/2017/05/menachem-feuer-thomas-pynchons-v/
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l