GRGR Continues

[David Morris]

>From: "Clare Kennedy"
>
>>From: "David Morris
>>
>>I think there are parallels/mirrors going on with the four "Sons":
>>Slothrop, Enzian, Tchitcherine, and Gottfried.  I don't think linking 
>>their
>>Mothers will be productive, except in the general sense of "Motherhood."
>>The Fathers can be more directly compared as agents of the War:
>>----------
>>(176.20)  They'll always tell you that the fathers are "taken," but 
>>fathers only leave - that's what it really is.  The fathers are all 
>>covering for each other, that's all.
>>----------
>How does that parallel mirror work? I don't get this quote about fathers. 
>Isn't this penelope? In Gravity's Rainbow (not that I doubt that you all 
>know this already, but in GR, it is often difficult to determine to whom we 
>should attribute what, so we must be very careful to figure out who is 
>saying what, which narrator, which character, OK, the fathers are more the 
>agents of war, but Penelope waits for her husband to return, in this case 
>her father because Tom is playing another nasty freudian joke here, 
>remember, her father is now a ghost--a shell.

The character of Penelope appears out of the blue, the scene having segued 
from the Hansel & Gretel puppet show via a bomb-drop and then an audience 
sing-along led by Gretel.  The last two lines of the song:
----------
(175.43)  And those voices you hear, Boy and Girl of the Year,
Are of children who are learning to die....
----------
THEN appears an abstraction, a lesson, Penelope and her revelation about the 
War's conditioning (children learning to die), fathers leaving, voluntarily, 
not taken.  Of course the War conditions both sexes, as is evidenced in 
Jessica's "catching" the War.  The ghost who returns to Penelope is not her 
father, it is the demon, War, who wants to possess her.Roger has had this 
revelation, and I he now sees the world clearly than ever.

This revelation first came to him (took him over) much earlier:
------
(125.32)  He was taken over then, for half a minute, [...] visited, not 
knowing till it passed how clearly he was seeing [in that instant of 
possession] the honest half of his life that Jessica was now.
------
If there really exists an entity called War, there is another entity which 
provided Roger this insight.  She is female.  Is it Love?  Whatever her 
name, she is in her pure honesty sharply contrasted with the deceit of the 
War.
[snip]
>>
>>In that context Jessica, the feminine, is the refuge from the war, but 
>>more
>>specifically it is "the Union" of the pair:
>>----------
>>(177.20)You go from dream to dream inside me.  You have passage to my last
>>shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life.  I'm no
>>longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are "yours" 
>>and
>>which are "mine."  It's past sorting out.  We're both someone new now,
>>someone incredible...
>>     His act of faith.
>>----------
>
>This is Roger's wish. Sorry Rog old boy, you can't both be new.
>

Maybe not with Jessica, he can't, but the possibility of such a newness has 
been laid on the table in a very strong way.  Jessica here has shown both 
its possibility and the strength of the War in resisting such ventures.

David Morris

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