visual reversal

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

This section begins with a contrast of two
days-"Yesterday's
in shades of gray under gray clouds
flat
white and palms in black sawtooth
.but this morning the
trees in the sun now are back to green
dry yellow, baked to
warm rusts, gentle corrosions all through Earth's colors,
pale raw to deeply burnished." At the end of these two
chapters we will see Slothrop in the rain, the storm that
has been steadily approaching throughout, bathes him in
"raindrops, thick as honey
inviting him to look down at the
bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain
all." Slothrop doesn't look, "he just runs." We, on the
other hand, can only look, as "His footfalls send up fine
flowers of water, each hanging a second behind his flight."
We are told,  "It is flight." Yes, Melodramatic flight. In
this role, Slothrop pulls at the heartstrings and nearly
cries, he runs with no place to go, the world has no use for
him just now. "Convulsive, helpless, worn out, snuffling,
wretched in his prison of soggy army wool," he thinks of
her, she has missed him, it's the only place he knew to go,
he climbs through her high window and the scene ends. We
read on, and write our thoughts here, sometimes like the
Conversation at the Spoon-"little more than proper nouns,
literary allusions, critical or philosophical terms linked
in certain ways." We might suggest that Slothrop represents
the fisher king, now little boy blue, now plasticman or we
might suggest that Katje is Aphrodite and Venus or Circe.
Knowing all along that Pynchon's boundless originality
defies the limited exhaustion of all possible permutations
and combinations, we look to the footnotes at the bottom of
the page and we look to each other to corroborate what we
find in and out of Pynchon's text. So here are some rambling
thoughts:

Slothrop is filed away in France and there are no rockets to
get Slothrop up, -only two pops and they are jokes (the
first one when Slothrop, perversely, waits for a first
rocket, but the war is gone north and he is in its wake,
"the only explosion around here will have to be champagne
corks, the second "pop arrives as a grace note for a scream"
when Grogori shows up).  The boys can't sleep cause "It must
take years to adjust," and "The World Over There
Just-like,
a dream's got, lost in yer brain!" So Tantivy and Bloat cast
Slothrop as Van Johnson-"Two Girls and a Sailor" (1944),
"That reckless Transatlantic," "As a sort of e-rot-ic
Clausewitz." They stroll out to a secluded beach like
Vincent Van Gogh into a Kurosawa Dream, or if you didn't see
that one, like Robin Williams in  "What Dreams May Come." 
Pynchon's description of the day, struck me as
Impressionistic, and we get, "Tantivy a bit dreamy, blinking
in the sun, 'oh, it sounds like a painting. Something by an
Impressionist. A Fauve. Full of light
.'" Now, "sounds like
a painting" may be an expression I am not familiar with, but
since we don't have auditory (reversal) here in France, the
visual is emphasized. Flash back to Spectro, Pointsman, and
Dr. Porkyevitch and the discussion of dogs and humans and
the Octopus.GR.52 - "show them a crab, WHAM!" and "You know
were set for sound stimuli, the whole thrust of this
Slothrop scheme HAS to be auditory, the reversal is
auditory
I've seen an octopus
and don't think I haven't
noticed those great blooming optic lobes." And, "what I
really need, is not a dog, not an octopus, but one of your
fine foxes." So we get Slothrop inside a horror movie
clip-"the biggest fucking octopus Slothrop has ever seen
outside the movies, Jackson" produced and directed for
visual stimuli. Flash back to "The White Visitation" and
"The reel is threaded, the lights are switched off,
Grigorii's attention is directed to the screen, where an
image already walks. The camera follows as she moves
deliberately nowhere longlegged about the rooms, an
adolescent wideness and haunching shoulders, her hair not
bluntly Dutch at all, but secured in a modish upsweep with
an old, tarnished silver crown
" After Katje is saved by the
crab, not by Slothrop's "WHAM!", not by the "Inanimate
objects which fall off the table when we are sensitive to
noise," she says, "They are very optical, aren't they." 
Film over, mission accomplished. Reckless Transatlantic
/monster movie roles finished, the phony girls move off,
leaving the leading lady-Katje "come in from the sea" from
the "sea, hard-surfaced, cherub blown
"
But she is dressed not as Venus, but "in a black bombazine
frock." Take a look at Remedios Varo's Venus, not that I
think Pynchon has it in mind.  In any event, Katje will look
more like venus when she invites Slothrop up to her room,
but before looking at that I want to make these comments.
Katje is aware of her roles and she is lifeless
pornography.  . "At the images she sees in the mirror Katje
also feels a cameraman's pleasure. But knows what he cannot:
that inside herself, enclosed in a soignee surface of dear
fabric and dead cells, she is corruption and ashes, she
belongs in a way none of them can guess cruelly to the
Oven
to Der Kinderofen
" GR.94  She is dead,
narcissistically enveloped by her own image, she "slides,
slips, squirms, floats, moves deliberately nowhere,
evaporates, re-forms," plays "what ever is expected of her"
she is the personality of pretense and she is all skin and
disease, mirrors and masks, narcissistic voyeur, and most
important I think, is the fact that she "knows her own
precarious thinness, her leukemia of soul and she teases
with it."   

TBC
TF