London

[Paul Delany]

With regard to a recent posting about TP's representation of British
culture in 1944: one specific problem, for me, is of vocabulary. In
the opening scene, which I take to be Pirate's dream, we get words
like "downtown," which no Englishman at that time would use. There
are others. Then Pirate cooks with a skillet, rather than a frying
pan (though we might conceivably assign this to the narrator's
American consciousness rather than to the English fryer's).
  Why did TP set out to be an exact kind of ventriloquist or
representer some of the time, but not all of the time? Is the
narrative being deliberately postmodernized with this confusion of
registers?
  Incidentally, there wasn't a "shortage" of bananas, there was an
absolute lack - I saw my first one somewhere around 1948.
  Paul Delany