larroquette & pynchon again

[Jody Keith Gilbert]

The *John Larroquette Show* episode where Dexter claims to know
Pynchon was rerun this week.  I got to see it this time.  I didn't
recognise Dexter's quotation from GR so I hunted it down.

******
Viking p. 627  Bantam p. 730
Bottles roll clanking on the floor, under the bonnet a hung-up tappet
or two chatters its story of discomfort. Wild mustard whips past down
the center of the Autobahn, perfectly two-tone, just yellow and green,
a fateful river seen only by the two kinds of rippling light. Roger
sings to a girl in Cuxhaven who still carries Jessica's name:

    I dream that I have found us both again,
    With spring so many strangers' lives away,
    And we, so free,
    Out walking by the sea,
    With someone else's paper words to say....
    
    They took us at the gates of green return,
    Too lost by then to stop, and ask them why--
    Do children meet again?
    Does any trace remain, 
    Along the superhighways of July?

[The last stanza here is the one quoted by Dexter in the John
Larroquette episode.]

Driving now suddenly into such a bright gold bearding of slope and
field that he nearly forgets to steer around the banked curve....

**********

The phrase "green return" confused me, so I hunted it down and found
one other instance of it as follows:

V p. 388-9, B p.452 

For the good reason that the U-boat has just appeared on the radar
screen of the U.S.S. John E. Badass (smile, U-boat!), as a "skunk" or
un-
identified pip, and the Badass, in muscular postwar reflex, is now
lunging in at flank speed. Reception tonight is perfect, the *green
return* [* * mine] "fine-grained as a baby's skin," confirms Spyros
("Spider") Telangiecstasis, Radarman 2nd Class. You can see clear out
to the Azores. It is a mild, fluorescent summer evening on the sea.
But what's this on the screen now, moving fast, sweep by sweep, broken
as a drop of light from the original pip, tiny but unmistakable, in
toward the unmoving center of the sweep, closer now--

**********
In the  2n'd instance here (first in the book) "green return" seems to
refer to the RADAR echo.  Does anyone have any insight on either the
source of Roger's song or any possible connection between the two
instances of "green return".

Jody

==============================================================================

John (Jody) K. Gilbert
Department of English
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C. Canada
office phone (604) 291-3220
dept. phone  (604) 291-3136
internet     gilbert at sfu.ca