No subject

[Clare Kennedy]

Slothrop, as Mr. Perez tells us (thanks!) is beginning to discover that 
Imipolex G, Sandoz, and LSD, the Swiss cartel, IG, Shell, and Psychochemie 
AG of Zurich are connected and that as his "ancestors" who "reassert 
themselves" and the signs (the smell of Imipolex G, mostly) are returned, 
they link him to a complex multinational control enterprise that has a 
patent on his penis.  This whole family thing reminds me of old Ludwig 
Wittgenstein's "Family Resemblance" and "Games": "And the result of this 
examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and 
criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes of detail. 66 and 
"I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than 
'family resemblances.'" 67 This is the kind of Irony Tom likes best, 
remember in V., at the end of the SW Africa narrative, it is Weissmann that 
decodes the sferics as "GODMEANTNUURK," an anagram of "Kurt Mmondaugen," and 
"DIEWELTISTALLESWASDERFALLIST." This irony (that metaphor and plot can not 
transcend a world in which the world simply is), is playing here again. 
Ludwig W. subverts Stencil's quest for V, but also opens to the history of 
what the "world" that is just the world (or case)-Sudan, Venezuela, SW 
Africa, Nazi Germany, with increased violence and the annihilation of 
CULTure and HISstory, culminating right here in the Zone with a mockery of 
Apocalypse (the "slate wiped clean" or for you metaphysicians, "tabula 
rasa"),  from which rises not an openness and Freedom, but the world that is 
the case. Slothrop is collecting clues, he has learned that his buddy 
Tantivy may be filed away with a toe tag and that Jamf may be dead, he has 
card from Waxwing, papers to be Ian Scuffing, he has money and a message 
from Squalidozzi, and Schweiter's material, and he is beginning to hear 
America as it sounds to non-Americans. He learns that the underground is 
just like the above ground market, organized as Semyavin tells him, 
"everything is specialized" from watches to dope. Slothrop discovers that 
"information is the only real medium of exchange," somethin he couldn't 
quite learn earlier from Katje and the boys. Slothrop learns that his 
Harvard sheep skin was payed for with his life, his father (Schwarzvter) 
sold his little white ass (is Slothrop white?) through his "uncle" Jim Fisk 
Lyle Bland to IG Farben and jamf. He learns that Imipolex G was a project in 
Nordhausen and that Polker worked on the project. He meets a lunitic racist, 
Marvy, who tells him of the Schwarzkommando. He makes it with Geli, 
Tchitcherine's lover and she gives him the full name of Schwarzgerat. Enzian 
tells Slothrop that he is free and Geli says the place is open now, back to 
anarchism, which reminds us of the argentine and the gaucho'cowboy American 
frontier of destiny. But , Slothrop is not free, as the repressed returns, 
including what has been repressed in Slothrop, the forbidden wing. Turns out 
that Slothrop's penis is wired down the white toilet bowl of the west, he 
can't think of it as his own anymore, can he guys? Not when it is "a 
colonial outpost." Schwarz-is everywhere and it seems that Slothrop and 
Enzian are Brothers in darkness, linked bythe rocket, bound and manipulated 
like slaves. Like the v-2, these boys have been subjected to external 
control, but Enzian at least knows his Master, while Slothrop's master only 
surrounds him at Jamf's grave like an odor, like a shadow.




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