GRGR 5: Hey, Wait Up for Me!

LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU
Fri Nov 22 13:20:45 CST 1996


Finally, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, but I'm still running to
stay in one place!


 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?

Previously, I noticed the similarity between the Pointsman-Spectro "Fox"
argument and the projection room scene in CITIZEN KANE, and I think there
may be other analogies, but Kenosha for some reason seems to have deeper
resonances for TRP.  Later, we'll encounter the city's name evoked in odd
places that would seem to have little or nothing to do with the Master.

BTW, David Thompson's recent (and typically quirky) bio of Welles, ROSEBUD,
begins with a section on his youth titled "Kenosha Kid" but TRP and GR
are not even mentioned!

 4) "Ascent" (61.24) Love that capital A!

But why is "sacrifice" not capitalized?  This phrase suggests at least two
things: 1) the Ascension of Christ and/or Mary into Heaven, and contrarily,
2) The Descent of the Dove--the tongues of fire of Pentecost which that
Eliot played off against the WWII bombardment of London:
	
	The dove descending breaks the air
	With flame of incandescent terror
	Of which the tongues declare
	The one discharge from sin and error.

	The only hope, or else despair
		Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre--
		To be redeemed from fire by fire.

		Who then devised the torment?  Love.
	Love is the unfamiliar Name
	Behind the hands that wove
	The intolerable shirt of flame
	Which human power cannot remove.
		We only live, only suspire
		Consumed by either fire or fire.
			[FOUR QUARTETS; "Little Gidding," IV]

And it also foreshadows Gottfried's Ascent (and sacrifice?).

All that in a 7-word phrase!

 6) "PISCES:" "Slothrop:" (62.4) Where do we suddenly get off with these
    attributions for the dialogue - like suddenly we are not at the
    movies but in a theatre? And look how we started in medias res
    again with the dream and then at 62.26/7 we step out onto the
    stage again and, lo and behold, we get `That was "sho nuf",
    Slothrop?' etc. by way of meta-narrative on the staged
    interrogation. Is TRP making the rules up as he goes along here?

Yes.  So did Melville.  See Chapters 36-40 of MOBY-DICK for similar use
of dramatic interchange (and doesn't Joyce do similar stuff in ULYSSES?).

BTW, I happened to glance at the first paragraph of Chapter 34 of M-D and
could swear it might have come out of GR!

Here's a question, though: Where does that "Rhythm's got me" song on p. 62
come from?  It sounds a bit like the "All God's chillun got rhythm" number
from A DAY AT THE RACES, which will be alluded to later, but I don't have
the film nearby to check.  Is it something else?

 7) "Her eyes tell him in an instant what he is" (62.39) So what is
    he then?

An interesting motif throughout the book is the image of a turning head
(which, I believe, begins with that Weimaraner (*why a Weimeraner?) that 
Pointsman and Mexico are hunting--unless you count Pirate's allusion to Betty 
Grable).  See also the reference to Cecil Beaton's photo of Margot Asquit at 78.12.
I'm not sure what to make of it but it continues throughout the book--a
sense of recognition, observation, connection that is never quite fulfilled?

What is Slothrop in this place?  White, of course!  (a-and we'll all know
what *that* means pretty soon--there's another Melville touchstone!)

 8) "The mouth harp in his pocket reverting to brass inertia" (62.40)
    So, is Slothrop a latter-day Orpheus? And that "brass", not to
    mention "jive" and "packs" in the next two sentences.

Slothrop is apparently a wouldbe hipster, the kind of guy who gives soul
handshakes and digs jazz.  (But compare Amiri Baraka's savage rip of
such guys in DUTCHMAN--"All the hip young boys dig Charlie Parker . . .")

 9) "these fine silver seeds stripping loose along the harp's descent
    towards stone-white cervix and into lower night . . ." (63.10) Why
    the sexual imagery here? Lovely phrasing by the way, also "low
    reeds singing" (63.16) and "silver chances of song" (63.20)

And listen to the fine accumulation of detail here--not just the catalogue
of items vomited forth but the incidental mention of "cold Boston rain"
against a window.

"Love has pitched his palace in the place of excrement" that Yeats sez.
And Brecht, in "Baal", comments on the Lord God making his true nature
known by combining organs of procreation with that of urination (he's
speaking only of guys, natch--or else is weak on physiology).  But is
the comparison then one made by Pynchon, the Narrator (whatever he/it is)
or Slothrop?  Does it matter?

And let's not forget the shoeshine boy!  Red, the true name is Malcolm (X),
and the references to giving one's *mind* a process recall one of the most
harrowing moments in THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X (reproduced in Spike 
Lee's film)--when Malcolm got his first "conk" and had to extinguish the
pain in the toilet!

    There are all sorts of keywords or phrases in this section which
    one could expound on. Anyone care to comment on "wasted Roxbury"
    (63.23), "wailing" (63.24), "floundered in the channel" (63.28),
    "Indian spirit plot" (63.30), "*have* mercy what is it a fucking
    machine-gun or something" (63.34), "32nd notes demisemiqauvers"
    (63.35), "Munchkin voice" (63.36), "honks" (63.39), "old Mister
    fucking Death he self" (63.40), "seeps" (64.1), "his bird's
    singing" (64.2), "prophecy [. . .] is beginning these days to work
    itself out in 'Cherokee'" (64.4) Amen!

Those Wasteland (Eliot again!!) images continue throughout GR--landscapes
blighted by war, commerce, or just the ravages of age.  Roxbury was at
one time a very toney suburb and later became a ghetto for Boston.  Compare
the ravaged landscape of Europe and the later ruminations on the Berkshires.

The "Munchkin" reference is just one of many that will come from THE WIZARD
OF OZ, again suggesting realms and orders of being that are normally unseen.

11) "That's just what a fellow doesn't want" (64.10) What an
    under-over-statement and how freudian thsi trip is turning out to
    be - hardly surprising since it is an Amytal trip conducted by a
    bunch of psychos^H^H^H^H psychiatrists. And while we are here how
    much of this whole scene is deliberately playing with Freud,
    dreams and psychoanalysis?

Pop references to Freud were all the rage, especially after the war.  See
Hitchcock's SPELLBOUND for some clever byplay (courtesy of Ben Hecht's
screenplay and a dream sequence by Salvador Dali himself) as well as
Val Lewton's original CAT PEOPLE.

But I'm not sure Freud is being played with that much right here.  Of course
the foax at PISCES are behaviorists, though not unaware of subconscious
fears and impulses, but the whole cross between blacks and excrement is
taken up again by Edwin Treacle and in the Domina Noctura segment--but more
on those anon!

12) "jiving the way they do" (64.18) isn't that  a lovely piece of
    patronising racism.

This, of course, is the *other* meaning of "they."  "They" is any group that
is treated as Other, essentialized in a racist/sexist/bigoted manner.  *That*
concept of "they" is useful to Them (or is that another bit of essentializing?).

13) "Pass the talcum to me Malcolm" (64.19) So we finally get our main
    hint that Red Malcolm is that Malcolm X. Along with "popping that
    rag" and "extravagantly conked" this is a dead giveaway to anyone
    who has read the Autobiography. I only came to it after reading GR
    so I got the flash of recognition as I read the original. Can
    anyone here claim to have recognised the Autobiography when they
    read Pynchon's rehash? If so how is he doing? To me, it's awesome
    the transformation he has effected on the source material.

See above.  But it raises an interesting question about intertextuality.
When "real" characters encounter fictional characters in books, what is
the result?  There was a lot of talk about this when Doctorow wrote
RAGTIME but now we're stuck with Forrest Gump!

15) "Now some folks might say [. . .] but Slothrop [. . .]" (65.1) Who
    is telling us this about Slothrop? Like someone is narrating
    Slothrop's dream on his behalf?

Most telling here is the end of the sentence: "[ . . . ] Slothrop doesn't
say much of anything because he doesn't *feel* much of anything."  This
is not-untypical authorial commentary on a character's mental state, of
a type you can find in authors from Hawthorne and James to the present,
but it's mixed with so many other narrational modes that it is often
hard to untangle.

16) "iron" (65.7) and not just any old iron but iron that was
    previously ceramic!

Well, now he's in it (in more ways than one).  He's in the main sewer lines,
built of iron pipes. 

17) "Some of it too of course must be Negro shit, but that all looks
    alike" (65.14) Just sneaks in under your stomach and induces a
    gut-boggling belly laugh. Note that it is the 'too of course'
    which is instrumental in making this joke so funny - Slothrop
    acknowledging that of which he knows zero other than that it must
    exist. The racism of presumption.

But specific characters can be recognized by their end product.  The aptly
named Dumpster Villard is one, but so is Gobbler Biddle.  That name is
interesting: the first name of course is intake compared to Villard's
outflow (so to speak), but the Biddles have long been one of the first
families of Philadelphia.  (Angier Biddle-Duke, recently deceased, was
chief of protocol for JFK).  So what's a guy who should be at Penn or
maybe Princeton doing at Harvard? 

18) "Jack Kennedy" (65.53 and following) The man who *seemed* as if he
    could save harps from gravity and who was daffy about
    history. This is as much looking back at Jack from the 60s/70s as
    it is looking up to him in the 30s. The use of aseem here is very
    telling, though. So if Jack is the saviour what does the harp
    represent, the one that you can bend those illegal frequencies
    (66.1) out of? And is the mention of history a way of reminding
    you (a la Steely) that without a historical perspective you will
    reiterate known errors or is it saying that knowledge of history
    won't save you from `old Mister fucking death he self', just as it
    failed to save Jack Kennedy?

Malcolm, don't forget, said that "the chickens have come home to roost" when
JFK was shot--and he would be gunned down only a year and three months later.

I'm enough of a cynic not to believe strongly in the JFK myth, but then I
detested Bobby K. when he was alive and found myself in helpless tears when
*he* was shot.  The denied possibility that JFK seemed to represent still
haunts this nation.  Folkie Phil Ochs (before *he* committed suicide), Oliver
Stone, and many others have believed in the myth.  Here, for Slothrop, the
myth comes before the man, at time when Jack was still living in the shadow
of brother Joe (not to mention his own Pernicious Pop).

19) "Down the toilet [. . .]" (66.6) Reminescent of V's sewers?

How would Slothrop have any reference point for comparison of the dingleberry
with "being torpedoed by Japs"?  Was he still in college when Pearl Harbor
came around?

But we *are* privy (so to speak) to Slothrop's mind when he is already
deep into WWII, recalling pre-war days.  The consciousness we have here is
*not* that of the college boy, but of the soldier recalling and projecting
himself back into college days.  If the racist fears evoked here are old
ones, the context has shifted.  One has to be alert or read this several times
in order to figure this out!


23) "It is a place of sheltering from disaster" (67.1) What? the sort
    of place one could go to enjoy those ols `mindless pleasures'? In
    which case we really are plumbing the depths of the mind (ho ho).
    n.b. Slothrop has only mentally gone down the toilet in two
    senses. First this is a dream brought on by an amytol trip not
    actual experience. secondly, at 63.21 it says either he has to let
    the harp go or he has to follow. Then it considers his following
    but does not actually say he follows. We have entered a dream
    within the dream (that in itself within the dream which is GR)
    where Slothrop on his knees dreams he is Slothrop down the
    toilet. So, we are recursively nested inside the minds of Slothrop
    after Slothrop and lo and behold we find that tranquility which we
    son't want to wake up from yet we cannot stop ourselves slipping
    away from.

See above.

26) "drumming" (67.75) Is this 11 beats then a rest Cherokee
    (i.e. pale face's pale imitation of Indian drumming)

I think there is an invocation here of the base rhythms of a standard
blues number

27) "Crutchfield [. . .] the Westwardman" Ok, I know it's some bizarre
    shit but . . . West is the setting sun, annihilationn and death.
    Is the cowboy element here because of Cherokee? And that
    Crutchfield sounds mighty like Marlboro man. In which case as his
    relation to his `pards' develops we see that Pynchon has `queered'
    Marlboro man and the wild West! (not to mention that Whappo is a
    mulatto - and you thought Blazing Saddles introduced this joke).

Remember, "Once, only once" is one of Their mottoes.  Compare that to Oedipa's
quest for the "chances for diversity" in America in COL49.

31) How did we suddenyl end up in the `Ardennes' (70.29)

Because this really *is* Winter 1944, the time, as Weisenburger notes,
of the Runstedt Offensive (or Battle of the Bulge), which occured largely
in and around the Ardennes.  Another of the prevalent but subtle markers
that help to keep track of duration in *histoire* (as opposed to the mental
gyrations needed to follow duration and other aspects of time in *discours*).

But also notice how we have turned from stomach-
turning rapture at the dog on the meathook to a "Disneyfied" and prettied-
up scene of death, the dominant color being (yes, again) white.

32) "segway" (70.36) Now that's what I call a non-segway? Have we
    perhaps left something behind on the cutting room floor here?

More an instruction to the reader, I should think.  Interesting that
he uses a musical term rather than a visual one (like "dissolve").

33) "Hush. [. . .] (72.6) Note that we are listening to a drawing
    talking here, foax.

This section exposes Pirate's secret--his *own* fantasies, suppressed
to the point where he has to take on those of others?

Again, in the notion of total knowledge and control that They might possess
about Pirate, we have another echo of Orwell's 1984: in that book, They
(or what is subsumed under the sign Big Brother) know your deepest fears and
are willing to use them.  

Does anyone understand the reference to "a simple Nihilist transposition"?
Sounds like some kind of term for a system of encryption, but is it?

Notice, BTW, that here is the result of the Rocket's firing--the message
("in Negro-brown"!) from Katje contained therein is now decoded.  Pirate will 
go to get her.  It took me three readings to figure *this* out!  Duh!

34) "He has no recourse, no appeal" (72.23) This recalls `a judgement
    from which [. . .]' in the opening section.

The message recalls Eliot and Pentecost and all kinds of                
archetypal stuff--it's fallen from on high, taken from the prime meridian
(at Greenwich).  So, if "the message is tantamount to an order from the
highest levels," exactly *how* high do those levels go?

35) "Why?" (72.31) As in why does Pirate get these orders? or why from
    Them? or what?

As in Why *can't* he get a bit of sleep, a cup of coffee or a cigarette?
The rationalization of human behavior to the appointment of tasks is something
that continually enrages TRP.  That's why Pirate's hands are "robots."  He's
Their instrument, poor guy.


Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)



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