GRGR Continues

[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:
>
>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.

Parallel mirrors? Can you explain this, sounds wonderful, but I'm not sure 
if I get it?

OK, let's put one foot infront of the other here. I said, I don't get this 
quote about fathers. Isn't this penelope?

And

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.


I said,
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.

"I don't want you. You're not him. I don't know who you are but you're not 
my father. Go away." Penelope says it's not her father. Is that the end of 
it? Not by a long pony ride.

"Is this really Keith, her father? taken when she was half her present 
age...only a shell (a shell?)...souls unwillingly become the demons 
known...Western magic as the Qlippoth, shells of the dead...Mothers and 
fathers are conditioned into deliberately dying in certain preferred 
ways...but fathers only leave--fathers covering for eachother..." pg.176

And Penelope's father returns as the narraor, after the Freudian Edwin 
Treacle, says, "Europe in the last weary stages of its perversion of magic 
lost, had incarnated real and living men, likely (according to the best 
intelligence) in possession of real and living weapons, as the dead father 
who never slept with you, Penelope, returns night after night to your bed, 
trying to snuggle in behind you...or as your unborn child wakes you, crying 
in the night and you feel its ghost-lips at your breast...they are real, 
they are living..."
pg.276-277

>>
>>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

Jessica or Roger? I can't make out what you are saying here David?

Thanks for the quotes on Roger, I'll have to give this more thought, but I 
don't think, at the moment anyway, that Jessica resists the war or that she 
represents a viable counter to Katje and the war, but Roger, I think, offers 
a counter to the fool, Slothrop, on the romantic side.


______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com