GRGR(1) resonances

[Jeffrey Meikle]

Someone mentioned the burning of the Crystal Palace as the symbolic end of
the British Empire.  The evacuation (like that of children from war-torn
London) takes place from some vast nineteenth-century crystal-palace train
shed, like Victoria Station ("iron queen"), out into a "progressive
knotting into" not unlike the multilayered constructions of railway cuts,
housing terraces, embankments, branching tracks and streets, tunnels,
arches, filth- and smoke-encrusted accretions of various periods of time,
that one views when leaving London by train.  There's a similar evocation
in Leonard Cohen's poem "Queen Victoria and Me," from his collection
"Flowers for Hitler" (1964), which he recorded in 1972 and released in 1973
on the "Live Songs" album:  "Queen Victoria/ I am cold and rainy/ I am
dirty as a glass roof in a train station/ I feel like an empty cast-iron
exhibition/ I want ornaments on everything/ because my love she gone with
other boys."  (Victoria is deliciously described as "the mean governess of
the huge pink maps," and there's much else that prefigures, echoes,
parallels the Pynchon of "V" and "GR".)  The "fall of a crystal palace"
also suggests the Tarot card "The Tower," with its crown tumbling in
lightning-struck flames from a medieval tower.

The monstrous sucking Adenoid section seems to refer back to Gogol's "The
Nose," which becomes detached from its owner and wanders around in a
greatcoat; possibly parodies and simultaneously puts down Philip Roth's
"The Breast" (1972), a meagre fable of a man who awakens to discover he's
become a detached giant female breast; definitely parodies the 1930s
Hindenberg zeppelin explosion broadcast and the bogus news flashes in Orson
Wells's panic-inducing radio play of H. G. Wells's "War of the Worlds"; and
also refers to one of Pynchon's underground pulp heros, H. P. Lovecraft,
whose story "The Dunwich Horror" (1929) concerned a similar giant fishy
slimy barn-sized behemoth sucking its way across the rocky fields of rural
Massachusetts and terrorizing the inhabitants.

All you Joyce fans out there...it's been 30 years since I read "Ulysses,"
but doesn't it open with a character (one who misleadingly seems to be the
main character), shaving and looking out over Dublin harbor from an old
tower on the coast, much as Pirate looks out over the "parapets," over the
Thames, the Embankment, and Battersea power station?

To end on a personal note, re. "your sound will be the sizzling night,"  I
still recall with a chill the mentally somewhat slow college janitor who
turned to me one day, with a peculiarly prescient gleam in his eye, and
asked, as he emptied the waste basket, "will the rain spoil the rhubarb,
eh?"

Sorry to blather on...I'm enthusiastic about this group endeavor.

Jeff Meikle