GRGR1 - Giant Adenoid

[Craig Clark]

andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk (Andrew Dinn) writes:

> But in my opener I deliberately asked whether the fantasy went
> one step too far for several reasons. Firstly, it comes so early in
> the book and as others have noted this sure does throw most readers.
> But what I find most disconcerting about it is the fact that it enters
> this early with such a big splash and then seems to disappear without
> trace (to remint a used dollar). Pirate's unusual ability doesn't
> really come into the rest of the book and, in fact, the Pirate who has
> the fantasies seems to have little conection with the Pirate who
> appears in the Banana Breakfast scene or later on in the book. The
> adenoid scene seems to me maybe to be a leftover from an early draft,
> an earlier thread which Pynchon was going to develop then dropped but
> never fully excised. In fact the whole idea of centering the opening
> around Pirate rather than Slothrop is decidedly odd. . . . but then
> that's next fortnight's topic.

I look forwards to it, but I am going to disagree that the Pirate of 
the Adenoid scene is not the Pirate of the later passages. There's 
that fascinating scene later set in the bizarre structure where you 
navigate using strips of taffy which is clearly "someone else's 
paranoid fantasy". The question, then, is "whose?"

My take on the opening - the evacuation of the first two pages - is 
that it's _the reader's_ fantasy: the structure we are "progressively 
knotting into" is that of the text itself, and that the same applies 
to the later taffy-navigable structure: it's the reader's paranoid fantasy 
of the endlessly convoluted structure of the novel. Pirate himself is 
thus like a taffy-strip - he's a route we can follow through the 
novel, and he's one who embodies our own fears/concerns/expectations 
about the novel, but he's not the whole novel, nor its central character. 

Nor for that matter is Slothrop. If  by the concept of "the central 
character of the novel" we understand "that entity whose inner 
workings we come best to understand, and around whom the events of 
the novel centre", then the central character of the novel is called 
Vergeltungswaffen Zwei - and it's with the screaming of that 
character that the novel does, in fact, open... Of course, accepting 
that a piece of military hardware is the central character of a novel 
is one of the other adjustments that a reader has to make (but don't 
forget that we later have a paranoid lightbulb taking up several 
pages with his life history).
 
> ...[snip]... 

[At this point there follows another of Andrew's learned disquistions on Pynchon's 
narrative techniques: for a mere computer scientist, Andrew, your 
analysis of Pynchon's narrative devices is deep and complex and 
immensely informative. Thank you.]

> If anyone is `the man who's having
> other people's fantasies' it's not Pirate but the narrator(s) (aka
> TRP) who so easily slip(s) into other people's thoughts and render(s)
> them as nested episodes in this multi-layered confection.

There's a thought... but equally the reader is "having other people's 
fantasies" (including the fantasies of Thomas Pynchon). All of which 
is to say that here is a novel which effectively blurs the boundary 
lines between reader, writer and character...

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"