GRGR(8) Discussion Opener

[David Casseres]

>Mrs. Quoad suffers from several skin ailments and according to "A
>Gravity's Rainbow Companion" they are as follows:
>
>Greensickness -- an iron deficiency which turns the skin green.

The term was also used in connection with the "green-and-yellow 
melancholy," which in some contexts, at least, was the sickness of the 
urbanized English deprived of their Green World, their Avalon, their 
Merry England.

>All in all, Mrs. Quoad is one hell of a hag.  Is there an echo of
>Katje/Gottfried/Blicero here?  Are Tyrone/Darlene/Quoad yet another
>Hansel/Gretel/Wicked Witch?

But of course.  But Mrs. Quoad and Darlene are also part of a picture of 
traditional lower-middle-class, shabby-genteel London during the 
hardships of the War, as it all might have looked to an American.  (Not 
that I ever was in London during the War, any more than Pynchon was -- 
but like him, I've seen many an English movie from the period.)
>
>We then go into, what will be called (on page 118), the Disgusting
>English Candy Drill.  At first I really couldn't determine any
>great significance in this scene; it just struck me as an instance
>of comic relief.  But when the DECD is over and Tyrone and Darlene
>are in the sack, the narrator briefly takes us back to the DECD to
>inform us that "...the one candy he did not get to taste -- one
>Mrs. Quoad witheld -- was the Fire of Paradise, that famous
>confection of high price and protean taste. (p. 119)

I too the Candy Drill to be just another part of that threatened London 
middle-class culture... but the Fire of Paradise bit is a marvelous 
mystery.

>So can we look at the DECD as some kind of allegory for Slothrop
>going through some kind of hell in order to get to Paradise, only
>to be turned back at the gates?  Isn't this the gist of the Tibetan
>Book of the Dead, that you have to deal with all of these demons on
>your way to Nirvana?

I think that's a stretch, not for thematic reasons but because the 
passage is so quietly written.

>Also, do the English really make such awfull candy?  Where's Andrew
>when you need him?

Oh, yeah, they really do make some hideous candy, even today.  What it 
was like during the War, I shudder to think.  And there is something 
intensely English about the horridness of the candy; it is the apotheosis 
of Horrible English Food (from the Yank point of view, natch).

>...Is there anything significant about the name "Yrjo"?

"Orgy" spelled inside-out?

>P. 125 -- "...maps (and the chief one, red pockmarks on the pure
>white skin of Lady London, watching over all...*wait*...disease on
>skin...*does* she carry the fatal infection inside herself..."
>
>This kind of makes London sound a bit like Mrs. Quoad, doesn't it?

Yes, and it reinforces my impression that Mrs. Quoad and Darlene are in 
fact a portrait of the ordinary poor fuckedup foax of England.


Cheers,
David