274
JEREMY LARNER
The difference is that having cast his nets so widely and deftly, he
n
comes up with so few fish.
S
It seems the author himself is a victim of "the inanimate world"
t!
his characters are so helpless against. Through its very technique
V.
h
loses the fight against mechanical domination and becomes only one
fr
more symptom of the disease it portrays.
It
is the logical novel of our
civilization, the educated technician's novel-a novel of facts, constructed
p
by a Master Engineer. The handling of detail reminds me of the
paintings of Dali, where one sees objects melted, scattered and tangled
tr
over great wastelands. Dali communicates his fascinated revulsion for
q
ob-jects via an extremely slick technique, but his point of view is
so
f
simple-minded, so deadly, that his paintings tum into the kind of
objects they represent. His humor is of the adolescent graveyard genre-
rc
hah-hah look how dead we are-but the joke's on him, because there
t
is a difference between life and death, and naked symbols leave us cold
We know better: we have known art that makes man the most he can
be. Thus with Pynchon: the scenes become photographs, the speeches
d
mere words, the characters counters, the action a plastic tape unrolling
from a computer spool. The symbols are only symbols, and the
0
characters remain so subservient to them and to their creator that they
lose all power to surprise us and capture our belief.
t
In the story of the yo-yo, Benny Profane, Pynchon might have
C
discovered his deepest novel. As Profane wanders through girls, jobs,
g
neighborhoods, one feels the sadness and desperation of those who are
t
spun to the borderlands of organized society and who drift there defeated.
t
These are the feelings that remain only undertones in the joy-chasing
c
of Jack Kerouac's
On the Road,
but Pynchon is often capable of
bringing them through with tenderness and insight.
i
One might remark here on the number of modern novelists who
\
have chosen schlemihls for their heroes, despite the limited possibilities
\
a schlemihl offers for heroism. Pynchon's conception of the schlernihl
l
is unique in that it departs from that of the Yiddish word, which means
a natural-born bumbler who invariably messes things up for himself
and others. Pynchon makes it clear that Benny Profane is a schlemihl
not only by nature but
by
his own choice,
implying that a schlernihl
is simply a man who chooses
to
remain passive in every situation that
life offers. For writers closer to the Yiddish conception, a schlemihl
is not merely a human yo-yo, but a person who, though prone to
bungling, can still act, and even take arms against his unfortunate
disposition. The schlemihls of Saul Bellow or Bruce Jay Friedman, for
example, are struggling to release themselves, and the reader struggles
