GRGR(10) - Plasticman

[rj]

> 
> (206-7) Four-color Plasticman goes oozing out a keyhole, around a corner 
> and up through piping that leads to a sink in the mad Nazi scientist's lab, out of whose faucet Plas's head now, blank carapaced eyes and unplastic jaw, is just emerging.
> ----------

This is a fairly distinct reference to cartoons, and popular culture
stereotyping (think 'Hogan's Heroes' and those Komikal Kamikazes, too.)
It is Slothrop who has the predilection for Plas, and who places himself
in the (super)heroic context here. And Pynchon narrates the comic strip
sequence as though it were a movie, or indeed, a real event in time,
just as Slothrop is imagining it. More crucially, the comic protagonist
is "framed" here, by both the medium and the stereotyped caricature of
evil presented within that medium. These are Slothrop's limitations. But
GR is a Bildungsroman after all, if an ironicised one, and Slothrop will
eventually learn to get beyond these barriers.

Later, just beyond Slothrop's loss of Bianca aboard the 'Anubis',
another cartoon reference occurs:

"Leaving Slothrop in his city-reflexes and Harvard crew sox -- both
happening to be red-ring manacles, comicbook irons (though the comic
book was virtually uncirculated, found by chance near nightfall by a
hopper at a Berkshire sandbank. The name of the hero, or being, was
Sundial. The frames never enclosed him -- or it -- for long enough to
tell. Sundial, flashing in, flashing out again, came from "across the
wind", by which readers understood "across some flow, more or less sheet
or vertical: a wall in constant motion" -- over there was a different
world where Sundial took care of business they would never understand.)"
(p. 472)

This image of transcendence or omniscience succinctly encapsulates
Pynchon's literary aspiration, to get "outside the frame". Ultimately,
this is what he manages to achieve with Slothrop. But Slothrop has no
access to the cartoon hero Sundial at this point, as he did with
Plasticman earlier, for the narrative has parenthesised the reference to
another time and place (and story!) and it serves as an aside to the
reader no less. Sundial is able to move beyond his fictive domain (and,
beyond moral stereotypes); this is the very lesson Slothrop and
Plasticman must come to learn too. Pynchon, like Sundial, is not
enclosed by the conventional frames of his medium. He is able to reach
across the "interface", into a world outside the fiction.

best