GRGR (16): Graffiti,

[Peter Petto]

On 12/16/1999, Doug Millison cited a passage from "A Child Roaming the 
Night: Oedipa's Dead Issue in _The Crying of Lot 49_" by M. W. Rohland in 
the current issue of _Pynchon Notes_ (40-41) that spoke to the recent 
discussion here about child abuse.

It's a very interesting article, another couple passages from it drew my 
attention:

>The Paranoids in The Crying of Lot 49, a group of young people who do 
>interact with the adult world, demonstrate the dangers of such 
>interactions in the Pynchonian universe. With reason, they see adults as 
>sexual predators. Miles suspects that "older chicks," like Oedipa, may 
>lust after his "smooth young body" (28), and Serge complains in his song 
>about the unfairness of Metzger's seducing his girlfriend: "For me, my 
>baby was a woman, / For him she's just another nymphet" (147). Oedipa's 
>husband, Mucho, who acts like a big kid and shows a sexual interest in 
>teenagers, exemplifies the confusion of generations about which the 
>Paranoids are suspicious. Thus Pynchon stacks the deck against nurturing 
>relations between adults and children; separation from adults, for all its 
>dangers, becomes a means of survival.
>
>The gang of unchaperoned children appears often in Pynchon's fiction: for 
>example, the Junta in "The Secret Integration," the Playboys and the 
>Maltese orphans in V., the Zone-waifs and the Rocket-City urchins in 
>Gravity's Rainbow, the mall rats in Vineland and the undisciplined Vroom 
>sisters in Mason & Dixon. Pynchon's fascination with children leading 
>other children in parentless or childishly parented communities, like his 
>fascination with families in general, has not received the critical 
>attention it deserves. What does it mean that one of contemporary 
>fiction's chief critics of social relations should insist on the band of 
>children as the most important yet the most endangered alternative 
>community? Do these children represent, as they often seem to do by virtue 
>of their freedom and affability, a model for human interaction? And do 
>they also represent, as their frequent imperilment suggests, a warning 
>against too much childishness? The difference between the liberated Geli 
>Tripping and the enslaved Bianca Schlepzig/Erdmann seems to correspond to 
>a deep ambivalence about children in American society that closer 
>examination of the novels' ambivalence might help us understand.

As I grew up, I was conditioned by too many Walt Disney movies, with some 
orphan, runaway, or otherwise parentless child or band of children was set 
in a world of adults who more often than not were clueless chumps.

Near the end of GRGR(16) one of these cultures seems to begin to assert 
itself, against the imperialism of Mother Russia's NTA:

>On sidewalks and walls the very first printed slogans start to show up, 
>the first Central Asian fuck you signs, the first 
>kill-the-police-commissioner signs (and somebody does! this alphabet is 
>really something!)....