GRGR6: The Dog Ate My Homework

[LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU]

Still lagging behind the Group Read, but in sight of the pack:


P. 73

3) "Ice of varying thickness, wavy, blurred, the legend to be deciphered
   by lords of winter, Glacists of the region, and argued over in their
   journals."  
   
   Is this a dig at scientists, literary theorists or academics in 
   general? (no offense intended to the .edu-foax)  Are we here talking 
   about some kind of hidden meaning, a plaintext, in a cipher of ice?

But of course (and no offense taken)!  Pynchon, following those Puritan
ancestors, describes the world as a Text to be deciphered.  But, as Hawthorne
pointed out, there's more than a little paranoia in such an enterprise.
Those Puritans saw the World as the Text of God, evidence of that Invisible
Hand right there for all who want to see it.  Pynchon, though, suggests the
Invisible Hand belongs to some other Force or Forces.
	The passage here is one of the remarkably dense passages that
one is always stumbling over in GR, an example of what Shklovsky meant
when he called "poetic [i.e., "literary"] language" a form of "roughened
speech" that slows us down in our reading.  You can't speedread GR--or
anyway, you shouldn't!


4) "Reg Le Froyd" -- anyone care to play with the possible meanings,
   permutations and combinations of this name?

"King of the Cold"?

Le Froyd sez that he is "related" to the sea.  Well, we all are, aren't we?
If you ever saw that series on science produced by Ma Bell and animated by
Chuck Jones, you might recall the first installment--HEMO THE GREAT.  Hemo,
the title character, is a blood cell (as in "hemoglobin") but, he rather
shamefully admits, his name derives from the Greek for "sea water."  The
salt of the amniotic fluid, the salt of our tears and those electrolytes
in the urine (that we'll see later on in GR) all make us "related to the
sea" as well.
	So Reg is another of the lost, orphaned, dispossessed, exiled who
troop through these pages!


5) "`Bert,' suggests the constable, trying to remember if it's right hand
   grasps left arm above elbow or left hand grasps...."  
   
   Any significance in naming the Lord of the Sea "Bert"?  What's the 
   arm-elbow-hand stuff?

"Bert is fine" just like poor Reg sez.  It'll do.  But Weisenburger associates
the name with Teutonic mythology in an interesting play of references.

Note also the double meaning of "Flotsam and Jetsam," which could of course
be seen on the shore, but was also (according to Weisenburger) the name 
of a popular BBC radio show.

QUESTION ABOUT P. 74
What is "fraying rust boucle" (accent grave over the e)?


P. 75

6) Myron Grunton and the "truffles of truth".  More ovine imagery -- any
   comments?

"Porcine," don't you mean?  MG, as Weisenberger notes, is a "sweet grunter"
and pigs are used to dig for truffles.  

Notice, in this passage, that Slothrop is being used by PISCES in
ways rather different from those that Pointsman ultimately wants to get to.  One
thing that is not quite clear is how Pointsman latches on to Tyrone in the first
place.  Is TS merely a fox, a sop accidentally thrown to Pointsman just to keep
him quiet, or was the rest of the TDY exercise, the sodium amytol, etc. all just
a ploy to allow Pointsman to get his clutches on him?

7) "They all talk of effectiveness, an American heresy...".  
   
   Why is effectiveness an American heresy?

Tut!  One should know!
First, "effectiveness" and "efficiency" have been watchwords of the American
experience from the Puritan get-go.  Ben Franklin, that crafty Mason, made
them into official virtues of the new Republic.  Frederic Taylor made them
the cornstone of American industry.

And it continues to the present.  Just ask the dodos in the state legislature
who decided that the State Universities in MN would be much more "effective"
and "efficient" if we were all merged with the 2-year community and tech.
colleges.  Now the governor is talking about further merger with the mighty
Univ. of Minn. itself--again in the name of "effectiveness" and "efficiency"--
all the while these "friends of education" are trying to gut the public
higher ed. budget, raise tuitions to be "competitive" with places like
Gustavus Adolphus and Carlton (which have some of highest tuitions in the
country)!  <grrr>

"heresy"?  Hmm.  That's more interesting.  Heretical against what established
norm?  Perhaps that of bureaucratic routine, which would be in keeping with
the whole crew (and funding) of PISCES.


P. 76

9) "Old Brigadier Pudding can live ... it's gone, another gone, another,
   oh dear...."  
   
   What's going on in this paragraph?  We seem to go from a description 
   of Pudding to Pudding's attitude towards Pointsman, to Pudding's 
   reminscence about Pointsman's father to Pudding daydreaming about 
   Polygon Wood (a WWI battle site?).  Did Pudding serve with Pointsman's 
   father?  Who *was* the ginger-haired chap?  What's "no bleeding use"?  
   What's "gone"?

Senility, shellshock, mere age--all of the above.  Poor old Pudding, the 
nominal commander, knows all too well that he's a mere figurehead to be
manipulated for money by the likes of Pointsman, while he's still haunted
by the memories of the devastation of WWI ("wastage of *only* 75%").  The
ginger-haired chap is, I think, simply an individual face that is a
signifier for the general slaughter.


10) "...where the front each day or hour changes like a noose, like the
    gold-lit borders of our consciousness (perhaps, though, it oughtn't
    to get too sinister here, exactly like them...better, then `like a
    noose') -- but also of the War-State itself, it's very structure."
    
    So consciousness is like a noose, which is also the structure of the
    War-State?  Are we talking about the tightening and loosening of a
    noose, or some other kind of change?

note that there's a comma missing above ("better, then, 'like a noose'").

The noose around Germany was tightening but continually shifting at this
point, with provision for a Bulge (q.v. Battle of . . .).  What's
startling here is that the structure of the War, easily enough imaged
in maps of the front lines, should be mirrored in the "border of consciousness."

Then, where is the noose of the consciousness, that poor cripple?

11) "Who can find his way about this lush maze of initials...?"  
    
    Indeed. Is the narrator here being rather tongue-in-cheeky-self-
    referential?  Isn't GR itself a bit of a maze of initials?

Well, certainly, but initials are signifiers for better or usually worse of
 the modern state.  Consider just FDR and his "alphabet soup" of agencies 
for ending the Depression, which created a structure more easily suited,
perhaps, to warfare.

A-and watch out for those sneakier initials later on--like CIA!


P. 78

13) What is Pudding's "Old Testament style"?

Autocratic?  Like the OT Jehovah--Thundering and smiting and "Thou shalt
not"-ing?

But, like so much else in GR, it's all show.  Pointsman regards it with
well-earned contempt.


P. 79

15) "Geza Rozsavolgyi, another refugee (and violently anti-soviet, which
    creates a certain strain with ARF)...".  
    
    Presumably ARF is pro-soviet? Why?  Because of the Pavlov connection?

I associate this Geza with Geza Roheim, a student and associate of Freud,
who was the first (according to Britannica) to use psychoanalysis as a
means of interpreting culture.  Britannica also sez that he theorized that
all culture springs from the bond between mother and child and (perhaps
more relevantly for GR) "that individual and societal development may evolve
from magical, symbolic thinking akin to that occuring in schizophrenia."

But, disappointingly, he was not in psy-ops during the war as far as I can see.

Read his speech patterns as indicated by commas and italics.  This is a beautiful
example of the kind of control TRP wanted over his dialogue, as indicated in
the intro. to SLOW LEARNER.  Stereotypical, perhaps, but very clearly marked out!

BTW, Weisenberger sez that the remark of Marshall Haig, "in the richness of his
wit," about Sasoon's refusal to fight (alluded to by Pudding) is "apocryphal."  

Is it?

p. 80

Note the shifts of narrational tone in discussing Pudding's peculiar forays
into cuisine.  There's the atttitude of Pudding himself, the voice of a
British staffing long for "the (sigh) the old potato) and the rather gleeful
voice, laced with *schadenfreud*, of a Narrator-Presence (whom I shall
henceforth note as NP).

BTW, that song "Would You Rather Be Col. . . . " that Pudding likes to sing
was composed by the team of Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, who also wrote
many well-known songs, including "Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?", and scored
THE WIZARD OF OZ!

P. 81

18) "But if personalities could be replaced by abstractions of power,
    if techniques developed by the corporations could be brought to
    bear, might not nations live rationally?  One of the dearest post-
    war hopes: that there should be no room for a terrible disease like
    charisma...".  
    
    Has this "postwar hope" come to be?  Couldn't tell it by American 
    politics.

Perhaps not.  But it remains an ideal of the rational corporate state and
is echoed in all of its manifestations as they creep into policy (not
politics per se), education, etc.--seminars on Total Quality Management
for legislators and deans, eg.


19) Anyone have anything to say about the MMPI and how it gives infor-
    mation different from a Rorschach test?  Structure vs. lack thereof.

Well, you might want to be reminded that it *does* come from Minnesota,
which perhaps from its Lutheran heritage, just loves to measure in order
to save: The Land of 10,000 Recovery Programs.

Notice, though, that the guy who objects *is* Pall of Ennui!

P. 82

20) Who is Rosie's "most famous compatriot" and what would make the staff
    "swear they've seen him crawling headfirst down the north facade"?

Bela Lugosi, of course--i.e., Count Dracula.  Look at the speech patterns
and watch Tod Browning's film.
DRACULA, in many forms, emerges as a major metaphorical reference point
throughout the novel.

21) Any comments on the transition from Poinstman's "We want to expose
    Slothrop to the German rocket...." to the description of the White
    Visitation?  Personally, I can almost see the camera work.

It *is* visually evocative, but the shifts of wording cannot be discounted.
Notice how in the description we not only have another haven for sainted
pigs, but shift from third person to second ("The sentry [ . . . ] stands
port-arms in your masked headlamps, and you must wait for him.")
Is "you" generic here, for the reader?  Is it specific for Pointsman or
another resident?  Is it general, for anyone wanting to enter?


P. 83

22) Why does Pynchon begin this section by writing in a script form?  
    What purpose/function does it serve?

One thing it does is to focus the attention on the subject of the conversation,
rather than on those engaged in it.  It creates a bit of a mystery to be
unraveled (as it soon will be).


p. 86
Note that we learn more about Slothrop's map here.  It doesn't "coincide"
with the rocket strikes, but is "*demonstated* to coincide."  Seems to
suggest that there may be a bit of tweaking of the data here too.

P. 89

27) Mexico: "...but there's a feeling about that cause-and-effect may 
    have been taken as far as it will go.  That for science to carry on
    at all, it must look for a less narrow, a less...sterile set of
    assumptions."
    
    Are we here referring to the onset of quantum mechanics, a statis-
    tical enterprise?

Go back to 86 and Pointsman's apparent hope that we can find "the stone
determinacy of everything" so that "there would be precious little room
for any hope at all."  This is apparently what Pointsman would like!

Mexico isn't quite aware of this but certainly disagrees.

Note here too references on this page to the "submontane Venus" (of
TANNHAUSER, whom we'll eventually meet in the form of Greta) and the
"yin-yang rubbish" that Pointsman despises but will later embrace.


P. 91

32) What about the "black latticework [which] is propped up by longer
    slanting braces, lances pointing out to sea"?  There must be some-
    thing here, I just can't visualize it.

Oh, what did they call those things?  They're barricades against invasion
from the sea.  You can see them in movies about Normandy.  Anyway, these
barbed-wire-laced stakes also suggest (natch) vectors of force.

And consider the wonderful contrast of Dr. Bleagh (just pronounce it!) and
his nurse making sport after a lobotomy!


33) Does this section end with Pointsman and Mexico walking off into the
    sunset?

Mexico, unsure of himself, enough of a scientist to be tempted by Pointsman,
walks off with him.  A Faustian bargain!


Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)