Kenosha Kid (Was Re: Discussion opener for GRGR5]

[Craig Clark]

"Andrew Dinn" <andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk> asks :

> 2) "Kenosha" (60.24) Kenosha is the birth place of Orson Welles. Some
>      have suspected that Welles is intended as `The Kid', citing the
>      mimicking of Wellesian film techniques in the text as the reason
>      for mentioning his birth-place. Anyone want to take this up
>      either for or against?

The Kenosha Kid poassage is one of my favourites in _GR_, presenting 
some of the novel's man problems in microcosm. Let's start by 
observing that it comprises a series of different usages of the text 
"You never did the Kenosha Kid", in each of which the text is "read" 
differently. In the same way _GR_ is a text which is open to mnaifold 
readings.

So why "the Kenosha Kid", specifically? There's some degree of 
consensus that it's a reference to Orson Welles, and I'd like to add 
tow suggestions to Andrew's:

(1) As has been pointed out (I think by Tony Tanner, but I could be
     wrong) it may be a reference to the framing narrative of 
    _Citizen Kane_, in which journalists try to trace the meaning of 
    Kane's life in terms of his dying word: "Rosebud!" They fail, not 
    realising that Rosebud, Kane's sled as a child, is both too profound 
    and too simplistic a key to unlocking Kane's life. So too with _GR_: 
    the Kenosha Kid reference is TRP's coded warning not to try to 
    apprehend the text through the pursuit of single references (carrying 
    on this theme from Oedipa's futile attempt to become a whizz at 
    researching strange references from obscure Jacobean melodramas). The 
    huge irony is that we have to pursue the meaning of the Kenosha Kid 
    reference to understand the message. Goddamn but this book is CLEVER!

(2) Of course Welles' other great achivement was his splendid radio 
     adaptation of H G Wells' _The War of the Worlds_, broadcast on 
     October 30 1938 and spooking, it is estimated, about 1 million people 
     who thought it was a real broadcast about a real alien invasion... 
     (Check out my review of an audiocassette release of this broadcast in 
     the rec.arts.books.sf archives if you're interested, foax). Hang on a 
     mo - what do we have here? Cylindrical shapes raining from the sky 
     bringing death, the confusion between reality and fantasy, maybe (as 
     happens with the Schwarzkommando) a bit of fantasy breaking off and 
     entering the real world? Are we talking about Welles or Pynchon here? 
     The two have a lot in common, it would seem. Chances are that 
     Slothrop coulda been listening in that halloween night...
 
So that's my take on the Kenosha Kid. A complex, multiple layered 
section of a complex, multiple-layered novel...

Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"