GRGR(17) Hauptstufe! (380.18) and premature ejaculations

[rj]

> Even before Brenschluss there are variables:

And again, as Enzian explains to Slothrop:

"One reason we grew so close to the rocket, I think, was this sharp
awareness of how contingent, like ourselves, the Aggregat 4 could
be--how at the mercy of small things . . . dust that gets in a timer and
breaks electrical contact . . . a film of grease you can't even see, oil
from a touch of human fingers, left inside a liquid-oxygen valve,
flaring up soon as the stuff hits and setting the whole thing off--I've
seen that happen . . . rain that swells the bushings in the servos or
leaks into a switch: corrosion, a short, a signal grounded out,
Brenschluss too soon, and what was alive is only an Aggregat again, an
Aggregat of pieces of dead matter, no longer anything that can move, or
has a Destiny of any shape-- "(362.21)

This almost sounds like Mr P himself talking, from the 'Togetherness'
article he wrote for Aerospace Safety. To my ears, at least. But it does
connect Enzian and Slothrop. As Slothrop is Rocketman, so the Herero are
the Rocket-People, as Enzian and Slothrop as Scuffling have discovered
here, and as david m. points out. And there is a further resonance with
the theme of the inanimate, the fetishisation of objects, that Terrance
is onto.

I think the name Rocketman used at 360 (narrative, not dialogue;
extra-diegetic, not diegetic), like the mention of Greta Erdmann at 364,
is pre-emptive. These dropped names prepare the reader for what is to
come, or confirm what the reader has already started to suspect. We have
already realised that Slothrop *is* Rocketman, his Grail is the Imipolex
Schwarzgerat. It just hasn't been announced to him yet: he hasn't
actually twigged, or donned the costume. He's slow, is Tyrone. Similarly
the future and conditional tense structures at 364.6up, where the
narrative conjectures about Slothrop's future relations with the actress
paves the way for the next stage of the journey, prepares the ground,
keeps the reader reading. It prefigures, too, that reinvigoration of the
subjunctive mood which is a project carried out more extensively in
*M&D*.

best