GRGR: Of Andrew's Comments

[LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU]

Andrew wonders about the following:

>`A judgement from which there is no appeal'? Beats me.

	The dream has paranoid overtones of someone being herded to a judgment--
divisions of prisoners at Auschwitz?  The Last Judgment?  The French Revolution
(look at the cockades on the guards' hats--but why lead?)?
	No appeal from any of those judgements!

>mates `rosy as Dutch peasants'. But unlike Pirate the peasants are
>dreaming of their certain `resurrection.'

	This seems to reflect an actual painting.  I think that there's
	a Breughel that shows a scene like this, but I don't have a
	reference for it.


>`champagne split' - apparently a `split' is a half-bottle of liquor.

	Yes.

>who is talking here? We need to be told this? On the previous page we
are told `His name is Capt. Geoffrey ("Pirate") Prentice. he is
wrapped in a thick blanket, a tartan of orange, rust and scarlet.',
external description, but then don't we suddenly dive into Pirate's
head with `His skull feels made of metal'? This is Pirate's phrasing
of how his head feels, not the narrators, not what Pirate is thinking
but how he would verbalise it. Same with `How awful. How bloody awful
. . .' two paragraphs down. Similarly, page 7 para 2 has `Oughtn't he
t be doing something . . . get on to the operations room at Stanmore,
. . .' and so on. Throughout this section we keep switching in and out
of Pirate's head, or rather in and out of his voice.

	And this becomes a quite typical narrative stance of the novel,
	freeling mixing 1) first-person observations, voiced and unvoiced;
	2) third person-subjective accounts of the character's consciosness;
	and 3) third-person, "objective" (a term used very loosely here)
	commentary on the first two.  We see this technique used again
	and again, with most of the major characters (and many of the minor)
	at one time or another

`"Incoming mail"' is quoted so maybe Pirate did whisper it? Whatever,
the peculiar thing is that this is before he gets the call to tell him
that there is some mail for him in the rocket. Did he know in advance
that Katje would plant a note? Or is this a premonition (someone else
whispered it?!).

	My take is that he does whisper it aloud to himself.  It can be taken
	originally just to mean "Rocket coming, watch out!" (typical military
	slang), but it turns out to be literally "mail."  This means that
	either Pirate had been told in advance that the message would arrive
	this way--or that he received such messages on a more or less regular
	basis!

The greenhouse is yet another attempt to tell Death `to fuck off'.
Perhaps also it represents an attempt to establish little Eden, to
reestablish the world before the first `fall'.

	But--from the time of "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" through
	"Entropy" to V., the hothouse has for Pynchon been a symbol of
	the self-contained, narcissistic and unnatural.  Is this a shift
	of priorities for TRP--or does the green(interesting use of terms)
	house have more than one meaning?


What exactly does BOQ mean? Bet Or Quits?

	Bachelor Officer Quarters--billets for for officers outside the lowly
	enlisted men barracks.

This reminds me of some
old sci-fi film where at the end everyone is warned to keep watching
the skies. It must be deliberate to link wartime bomb paranoia with
50s aliens paranoia, nix?

	Two possible links here--one to Hitchcock's propagandaesque FOREIGN
	CORRESPONDENT that ends with a warning to America as the bombs begin
	to fall while the war begins, or perhaps more tellingly, the end of
	the original version of THE THING (aka THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD)
	which ends with the scientists defeating an alien invader (a blood-
	sucking carrot played by James Arness--I am not making this up!) and
	warning people by radio to "look to the skies!"

`SNIPE and SHAFT'? Never heard of a pub with such a name. There is,
however, a pub called the Tantivy in Watford, complete with foxhunting
scene on the pub sign (tantivy, like yoiks and tally-ho, is a hunting
cry).-

	"Snipe" (backbite, make cutting remarks) and "shaft" (screw people
	over) seems to be what the customers here are very good at doing.


`pixilated' apparently means deranged or disoriented and is derived
from `pixie-led'.
	
	Your definition is correct, but it's not listed in my ed. of the OED.
	The term is used importantly, though, in Frank Capra's MR. DEEDS GOES
	TO TOWN.


Anyone have an idea who Eugene Sue was?

	Early 19th Century French novelist, writer of weighty tomes, the
	best-known of which is THE WANDERING JEW.