GRGR(22) - Jonah

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

"For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's
belly; so shall the son of man be three days and three
nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40)



I can't make much of this "face of Jonah" allusion (GR.480).

I am reminded of Albert Pinkham Ryder's Jonah for
some reason, perhaps because he also painted The Flying
Dutchman and like Ryder's oils, these chapters are blurred
and obscure,  but this "face of Jonah" is not much, 
certainly not as interesting as Melville's, I mean Mapple's
sermon.  
Chapter 9 of Moby-Dick,indeed all of Moby-Dick and
Confidence Man must have crossed
Pynchon's mind at some point while he was pulling all these
ships and boats off his book shelf. 

"Under that cheerful mask is the face of Jonah." 

"You mean, uh, the, uh--"

"I mean Margherita."  GR.480


What was Slothrop going to say? You mean, uh, the girl,
Bianca? 

Was Stefiana watching too"

Margherita? 


"Looks like German movies have warped other outlooks around
here too."

"You mean Margherita's." GR.474

Margherita's, perhaps all aboard the Anubis (civilization).
We could look at the Toiletship as the mind and the Anubis
as civilization. 

Later, GR.501, "Barracks have had their roofs blown away:
spinal and ribwise and sunwhite the bones of these creatures
that must have held in their time half the Jonahs of falling
Europe. 

So what does she mean by the face of Jonah? 

My guess is she means that Slothrop is not really a party
animal like the  others, or he is simply the bad luck guy
here, the
guy  that draws the lot, the guy God or other
forces of great wrath are after and that may not be the best
thing for the rest of the mariners aboard the Anubis. 


As Jonah could not escape  by sailing away, neither can
Slothrop escape, and perhaps like Jonah Slothrop is simply
directed and his actions will not produce the outcome he
desires. 


 Slothrop is now cycled over to ant-paranoia.
Nothing is connected, he is numb, he ought to be alarmed,
but he can't, as Orpheus (Orpheus torn to pieces, Dionysus
rituals, also Lycidas, "Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian
shore) he has sex with Bianca (his Eurydice in mock
form--she is lost) and  he is lost in the belly of the beast
of his solopsistic mindless pleasures as the zone moves
entropically in all directions at once. 

In some stories of Osiris, after being scattered   he is put
back together without his penis. His penis is swallowed by a
fish. 

The voyage on the Anubis is a progressive knotting into the
evil predicament. The folks aboard do not, as Jonah's fellow
sailors do, toss things off the boat to make it more sea
worthy, they don't cast Slothrop into the sea, into the
deep, into god's fish, no, they "throw everything of value
over the side" (GR.668) letting the only one that can see,
the winged jackal, guide them.  This "degenerate company"
that Slothrop has fallen in with cannot remember their own
dreams, not because they have journeyed with Dante aboard
one of the boats following his bark through Purgatory, but
because they are caught in a perpetual limbo.