GRGR(6) Wings Of Desire

[rj]

s~Z wrote:
> 
> Pp. 131-136 gave me the same feeling as the opening of Wenders' film
> 'Wings of Desire' in which two angels are surveying the city, their POVs
> shifting randomly from one street to another, one car to another, one
> apartment to another...no plot to tie the images together...no character
> development to provide context or background for the overheard
> conversations...just momentary visitations to the seemingly unrelated
> parallel microcosms which make up the ungraspable macrocosm.


That's a pretty good precis, actually. The Jamaican with his "soaring"
voice is a "mock-angel" (135.16).

What's interesting in the Advent sequence is that, against both Rog and
Jess's better (secular/atheistic -- "To hear the music," Rog finds it
necessary to announce) instincts, they do enter the church to listen to
the service. And this spontaneous and unexpected detour provides the
framework and excuse for the imaginative flight *Pynchon* embarks on in
this sequence. 

Is it just the glorious, multicultural music ("*O jesu parvule*, / nach
dir ist mer so wehr . . . ") which enables these transcendences? (of
nationalistic and cultural rivalries in these vespers? Rog and Jess's of
their to this point exclusively *physical* love for one another? the
soldiers' of their tiredness and despair and dirty boots and smothered
farts in the triumphant harmonies of these hymns? the narrative's sudden
omniscience (omniaudience?) to "the War's evensong"?) Or is Pynchon
allowing the illogic of Faith a foothold -- despite all the ironies --
in his vision of historical indeterminacy? (a possibility allowed that
the baby *is* smiling?)

There are a lot of themes and connections in the monologic torrent which
the music inspires, the angels'-eye-view of daily life in
Britain-under-siege this Christmas:

The Jamaican corporal is a pair with Enzian, isn't he? The notion of the
suicide of Empire is both ironic (Jamaican culture has been debased and
will be lost, just like the Hereros': the Jamaican corporal
self-consciously becomes a travesty singing for coins at the London
docks), and a correlation of Brittania to the Reich.

The image of "sown mines which crowd thick as plums in a pudding"
(128.16) sets up the conceit of the whole passage I think. (I assume
that fields of land mines were actually planted on the English coast in
an earlier year of the war -- Jess, a Kentish maid herself, perhaps,
remembers this -- because of the threat of a German land assault?) But
the metaphors actually run both ways. Bitterly, war (land mines in the
earth) mocks the domestic and devotional routines (plums in the
Christmas pudding) of human fraternity. But, even so, it *is* still
Christmas: even in wartime the routines have prevailed (there are still
puddings). This continuity repeats myriadfold: toothpaste tubes
transform to war machinery while the "phantoms of peppermint" persist;
Indo-Chinese and Italian POWs are all part of the urban mix of
Christmas, amongst the prams of returning wives at the railway stations,
the sorting of Christmas mail; the Spam tin tanks. 

"Life has to go on." (132.30)

Likewise, Christmas decorations and Nativity dolls and Kings are only a
dt away from their Judaean *and* 1944 analogues; like the rockets and
the bombs and the fireworks and the Christmas star of the Magi; like the
"Jewish collaborators ... selling useful gossip to Imperial
Intelligence" (135); like the human songs of Faith themselves, going
back to the beginning of human history, the first human utterances, and
right up to now to vapid Noel Coward sopranos.

The final lines ("whatever seas you have crossed") look back to
Pointsman's and Rog's walk along (Dover) Beach and forward to the
submarine section, another advance on the ongoing unsettledness and
constant competition and replacement of the various epistemologies
represented in this text. For here, for Jess and Rog, for us as well(?),
"Xmas" (126-8) gradually becomes "Christmas".(131 ff passim)

best