GRGR: Andrew's questions

Fri Oct 4 13:20:33 CDT 1996

Some thoughts about Andrew's questions.

Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)

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1)  This section is quite difficult to draw any broad themes out of
    since it is i) full of lots of lovely itty-bitty details,
    beautifully rendered but disparate and ii) delivering a whole load
    of stage directions and scenery which introduce but certainly
    don't explore in detail later obsessions. It would be interesting
    to know what people thought was going on the first time they read
    this scene and maybe contrast with what they saw on their latest
    reading.

	The first time was indeed hard to make sense of, leaving two options:
	1) can the whole enterprise, or 2) immerse oneself in it, like 
	listening to Wagner's Liebestodt (sp?).
		But later, on subsequent readings, details come into focus,
	patterns emerge.  It's like certain paintings that you simply have
	to watch for a long time before you see the details that aren't
	immediately obvious--Rembrandt's landscapes, Monet's haystacks,
	"The City Rises" by Boccioni (at MOMA).

2)  Bloat's hairbrushes are `exquisite' but the girl at the desk is
    `gum-popping' (p 17). There is loads of US English mixed in with
    the UK English. Whose voice is it?

	As usual, that curious mixture of something passing for stream of
	consciousness, first person-indirect, and third-person "objective"
	voices.  The result is like watching a ventriloquist who wants you
	to believe in the dummy but also wants you to know that his lips
	are moving.

3)  Why is 8:20 a mythical hour? (p 17)

	Aren't they all?

4)  Who are the curious gods' offspring to whom the `provisional
    pyramids' (p 17) have been erected?

	The inhabitants of ACHTUNG, apparently, who parody the Pharohs--
	those gods' offspring who built the permanent structures.

5)  What purpose do the many lists of objects (e.g. Slothrop's deskful
    of bureaucratic smegma) serve?

	Hoo boy!  This question can touch as many nerves as the map
	(see below).  At the very least, it is a *list* and lists can
	be powerfully evocative.  Homer knew that.  Whitman and Ginsburg
	turned them into celebrations/denounciations of the American
	myth of Plenitude.
		More specifically, items within the stata later acquire
	a fossil-like status, introducing characters, themes and motifs
	that will continue to emerge, eg.:
		mother Nalline, a ukelele, the eye of a Weimaraner (and
	did that dog derive its name from the home of Goethe and the
	interwar Germany? Is it only coincidence that this is also the
	breed of the best know Performance Art pets--Will Wegman's Man
	Ray and his successors?).
		A-and there's that "orange nimbus of an explosion (perhaps
	a sunset)."  See the Hand, below.

6)  `he's a sort of American George Formby' - Slothrop or Pynchon? or
    maybe Tiny Tim?

	Well, the overt reference is to Tyrone, but . . . 

7)  I suppose there has to be a question about the map, so err... what
    about that map?

	Right away, the mention of the map tells us that its status is
	problematic.  Does it matter that the stars are in colors? 
	(Bloat's lack of color film is due to bureaucratic beancounting--
	one of those saving (literally!) mistakes that They can make.)
	Are the girls even real?
		Why is the whale white?
		We have been *warned*!

	But, later, we "learn" that the colors represent how Slothrop
	feels/felt that day, that the map, "[a]t its best . . . does
	celebrate a flow," a hedge of memory (?) against the coldness
	of the day and fear of the war.

8)  What does TDY mean? As in `orders sending him TDY some hospital out
    in the East End' (p 20)

	Army initials for "Temporary Duty."  Still in use, as far as I
	know.
		But some duty!  To go to The White Visitation and get
	shot full of sodium amytol!

9)  `Atlantics aplenty' - what does William's out and back journey
    signify?  What is the significance of this vast open space
    separating the US from Europe? How does it serve to define, at
    least in part, America and Americans (and why not also Europeans?)

	"Two cultures separated only by a common language" (GB Shaw)?

	Old Europe does (eventually) extend out from this distinction
	between the Old and the New Worlds.  
		The myth of the New World is (1) plenitude, opportunity,
	the New Eden, Winthrop's and Reagan's City on a Hill, u.s.w.
	vs. the decay and decline of the inbred and corrupt Old World;
	or 2) a godforsaken wilderness lacking history, culture or grace
	vs. the respository of the best that has been thought and said.
		The very descendents of the original propagators of the
	first myth wound up buying the second--Henry James, T.S. Eliot,
	et al.  (And in this view Europe is to America as the East Coast
	is to the Midwest--see Fitzgerald, who just turned a posthumous
	100, for more on that!)

10) Hooker was one of the early Puritan settlers in the US wilderness,
    adding a certain grand historical or maybe even messianic overtone
    to the image of garden love vs wild love. For goodness sake,
    someone please draw in colonialism, Puritanism, the chaos/order
    divide, technology, nature in the raw, science vs revelation,
    Hawthorne, Melville, . . . knot them all in! Oh and is the rest of
    Hooker's writing so melodious?

	I grew up just outside of Hooker's Hartford, but had no idea the
	guy could write like that!  He was just a statue by the Old
	State House for me.  (And in school, we only got fed Edwards and
	the Mathers.)
		But think of how the wild/garden growth metaphor plays
	into Pynchon's dichotomies: anarchy and tyranny; street and
	hothouse; etc.

11) There are certain phrases in this section which are breathtakingly
    beautiful, not just Slothrop's coda to the Hooker. Try otu the
    samples below and see if you can make out exactly why they strike
    one as so apt, so precise, so sharp.

	A few thoughts: 1) they are indeed often precise in visual
	detail (the stockings against the window light); 2) adjectives 
	and adverbs repositioned to unexpected objects ("tobacco-starved, 
	headachy, sour-stomach middle of the day, . . ." and more
	Ginsburgian echoes too!); 3) dropping of hints that picked
	back up again, as the fireflies of Mass. morph into the tip
	of a cigarette; 4) high rhetoric laced with hard-boiled slang
	("no, no bullet with fins, Ace . . . not the Word, the one Word 
	that rips apart the day. . . ."). 

12) `Death is a debt to nature due, which I have paid and so must you'
    (p 26) Is this taken from someone's writing or just traditional,
    anonymous stuff. What about the Star-spangled banner meter verse.
    The Diskinson can be found in the Collected Works only watch out
    for `Ruin is formal devil's work' (p 28) which is a 2nd verse to a
    far more mundane opener.

	Scholars have quibbled about whether a Calvinist would have owed
	her debt to "nature" or to God, but maybe she was one of those
	*heretics*!  A-and if it's not a real epitaph on a real tombstone
	in New England, it *ought* to be!
		The Star-Spangled rhythm may be coincidental (like singing
	Ms. Dickison to "Yellow Rose of Texas" or "Auld Lang Syne"), but
	it might be worth recalling that the anthem's tune was lifted from
	a barroom drinking song, "To Anacreon in Heaven."

13) Why are `Shit, money and the Word' (p 28) the `three American
    truths'?

	Shit--Because It Happens, and because Americans fear it, hide it,
		try to forget it.
	Money--You have to ask?
	The Word--The Word of the Republic (unlike that of the British
		constitution) is on paper (like the Bible).  The Khirghiz
		know what happens when you write things down!
		And the Word is the Law is the Father is the Son . . . 
		If ever there was a logocentric country . . . 
		Deconstruction, anyone?

14) Constant, Variable, . . . Quadratic? Cubic? Quartic? a progression
    by integration rather than differentiation. Slothrop `hangs at the
    bottom of his blood's avalanche' (p 25) the outward fanning A of
    generation contrasts with the narrowing V of ancestry which ends
    at Slothrop, the accumulation of siblings at each stage tied to a
    corresponding dilution of fortune for the family members. Both
    principles appear neatly squeezed into that one word AVAlanche.
    Can you identify this theme of `decline in increase' elsewhere in
    the novel?

	It may imply progression/regression--or it may just be a cheap
	and sharply funny joke (like Corporal Wayne).  "Constant" is
	a not-untypical Puritan name, but "Variable" brings one up
	short.
		But the ruin of old families is another Great American
	Theme, especially for WASPs and wannabees.  See THE HOUSE OF THE 
	SEVEN GABLES, the plays of O'Neill, and the writings of Pynchon
	favorite Henry Adams (who *lived* the theme!), as well as that
	displaced New Englander, Faulkner.
		But what does it mean to have lost the grace that afforded
	Election to one's ancestors, to no longer be in the company of
	Them?  M'ba-kayere!

15) If the rocket is also the `great bright hand reaching out of the
    sky' then is it a messenger? and is its message one of death or
    revelation?

	Yes.