GRGR: Those Frenchmen

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

DudiousMax at aol.com wrote:
> 
> Yo,
>                 Thanks.  This is, not to put too self-serving a point on it,
> yet another example of Pynchon's "misdirection."  He gives us something in
> the text, the fur-henchmen pun, slightly altered, that leads us to something
> outside the text (the song) which happens (in 1927!) to be IMHO a criticism
> of U.S. Gov't intervention in realms of personal behvior (kissing on the
> street), dress codes, censorship, book suppression, prohibition, and even
> homosexual cops.  Sung by an American.  The elaborate set up of the
> fur-henchman pun is, like the Disgusting English Candy Drill, a joke on the
> surface.  On the subtextual level, it is thematically related to the major
> threads of the book, totalitarianism.  I know there are those who will say it
> is too great a stretch: but they are those who think the black licorice
> bazooka is the main thread.  But what do I know?  I'm only...

                 
Max,


It's rather sup rising that Weisenburger (GR
Companion.240.V559.16-17) calls this "pun" "The most
elaborately staged pun in all of GR." Surprising because
Weisenburger's Companion and his other publications
demonstrate what used to be called "a close reading." Now
Weisenburger's Companion does not claim to be an exhaustive
reading of GR and clearly it is an invaluable book for those
that favor close readings of texts, but these elaborate puns
are all over GR--the ones that involve Rilke are much more
elaborate than this one here. What a reading like yours
brings to the table, at least for close readers, is the idea
that these elaborate "puns," as you say, are THEMATICALLY
related to the major threads of the book(one being
totalitarianism), subtextually AND I would add Textually.
The threads on the underside of the tapestry may be more
revealing at times, but they do not cancel out the textual
threads. The black bazooka? Are you referring to some pun on
repressed homosexual desires? Whose? Slothrop's? Oh no, you
can't mean that, that wouldn't make any sense at
all--subtextually or textually.