GRGR(10) - Plasticman

[David Morris]

>From: rj <rjackson at mail.usyd.edu.au>
> >
> > (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'

Please, let's don't.  Pat B., _Life is B._, and _B. the Liar_ are all to 
prevalent.  I'm beginning to believe the Hype.  Shit.

>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

But before Sundail was Rocketman.  His existence was as contigent on frames 
as Sundial's, his being "locked" onto newsprint paper.  They don't expect 
him to really appear, let alone usurp.  Rocketman can be invisible too.  
He's also famous throughout the Zone, but that's spoiling...

David Morris

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