SLPAD - 101 - "Low-Lands" - 14 - Molemanship

[Michael Bailey]

"But he would occasionally be caught, nights when snow drove down out of
Connecticut, across the Sound, to lash at the bedroom window and remind him
that he was lying in the foetal position after all: he would be caught
red-handed at Molemanship, which is less a behavior pattern than a state of
mind in which one does not hear the snow at all, and the snorings of one’s
wife are as the drool and trickle of amniotic fluid somewhere outside the
blankets, and even the secret cadences of one’s pulse become mere echoes of
the house’s heartbeat."


This by way of beginning to explain the particular discomfiture that kept
him returning to his analyst, Geronimo Diaz.

There's an actor by that name, but his earliest credit is for "Cupido
Contrabandista" (1962) so the time doesn't quite work out with the data
available.


Two speed bumps in the following passage:

"His analyst, a crazed and boozy wetback named Geronimo Diaz, had, of
course, a great deal to say about this. For fifty minutes every week Flange
would be screamed at over martinis about his mom. The fact that the money
spent on these sessions could have bought every automobile, pedigreed dog
and woman on the stretch of Park Avenue visible from the doctor’s office
window disturbed Flange less than the dim suspicion he was somehow being
cheated: it may have been that he considered himself a legitimate child of
his generation, and, Freud having been mother’s milk for that generation,
he felt he was learning nothing new."

"Wetback", of course, and the notion of "buying every automobile, pedigreed
dog and woman on the stretch of Park Avenue visible from the doctor's
office window" - one's sensibilities recoil.

The obvious purport, though, accentuated by martinis during the sessions,
is "unappreciated - largely unenjoyed - wretched excess, posh upon posh"

Noting the more sophisticated and sympathetic treatment in BE of Leopoldo,
Shawn's Lacanian shrink, helps here. Leopoldo and Marvin supply some usable
support, even through their mostly comic relief, which is somewhat less
disrespectful of Leopoldo than of Shawn.

Then (I have, and also seem to perceive in the text) a sincere wonderment
about the apparent high status of Freud and the popularity of analysis in
that place & time - it's something that shows up in a lot of
contemporaneous stories, and in _V's_ supplanting of confession from
priest, to psychiatrist, and finally dentist.

I'd venture cautiously that what Pynchon seems to be showing w/r/t
psychoanalysis is like "how the heck could talking about one's mother help
- but apparently it does for some people" (similar to the way a
non-Christian might wonder, in a nutshell, how people can think Jesus being
crucified, however death-defyingly  glorious the aftermath, could affect
anyone else's guilt one way or another?)

Dubious assertion:
Just as the panoply of available serious fiction in that Zeitgeist made it
unnecessary to detail the horror of the practice of corporate law for a New
World Writing reader, the plethora of analysts in fiction might have
offered an opportunity to thought-provokingly lampoon the analyst/patient
relationship.*

And the whole tale seems like an inventive permutation or offshoot of a
genre consisting of a variety of "dropping out" stories starting with
Bartleby.

(*Portnoy's analyst achieved a comic effect without saying much at all.)



Also - Molemanship alludes to "brinkmanship", coined perhaps by Adlai
Stephenson to describe John Foster Dulles's extremist policies towards the
Soviet Union - droll detournement of political nomenclature, but also an
early cognate of, what's that word? Cocooning, withdrawal into one's
comfort zone. Which Flange (rightly or wrongly) associates pejoratively
with regression to pre-birth, driving him back to the analysis he's so
dubious about - which, and this is pretty ironic, isn't it? - also focuses
on early-life issues.