GRGR(4) Cherokee

[Doug Millison]

Great stuff about the song Cherokee in the discussion so far. The song
rides over this scene the way racism vis-a-vis Afro-Americans overlays the
genocide of the Native Americans, which TRP takes up again in M&D, a novel
that digs deeper into the historical roots of the racial politics politics
and global economics that structure GR, showing how they originate in
colonialism, the mercantile economic system, and the emergence of chartered
corporations that would take on  legal powers to make them equivalent to
persons (extremely powerful persons) under capitalism.

The kind of deep-seated fears that drive Slothrop down that toilet are
responsible, in large part, for keeping me and many of my contemporaries
out of jail during some wild and wooly younger years. Too many horror
stories about what happened to young white car theives and hop-heads who
wound up staying overnight in south Louisiana jails. But that's another
story.

It's also the second example (unless I've lost count) of TRP more or less
telling us directly to go outside the text to find the lyrics to a song
(the first song he points us to was "Dancing in the Dark", alluding to the
lyrics' true meaning, where Scorpia, like most of us reading GR, is "too
young to know that, like Pirate, what the lyrics to 'Dancing in the Dark'
are really about" p. 36).  TRP sends us out to do the dirty work, as Max
said in his Cherokee post:

>  He leaves it to us.  And little by
>little the unspoken punchlines, the incomplete syllogisms, the incomplete
>analogies, the half-names, the look-alikes, become more sinister, more
>political.  Once he establishes this as a general operating tactic, then he
>can put more and more stuff out there, without ever saying the most insulting
>stuff, just leaving us to fill in the blanks.  This is his "Strategy of
>Transfer" that he speaks of in the intro to Slow Learner.

Maybe this technique is part of what TRP offers that is new as a novelist
(I'm not talking about the content of his book, but about his technique)?
I'm probably forgetting something very obvious, but can anybody else think
of a novel of this stature in which readers are repeatedly, and explicitly,
directed to go to other books to fill in the blanks?

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