Apocalypse: "Not for Sale in Canada"

[jbor]

I love the way that this novel comes full circle on you. At each reading 
that closing fragment, and the launch sequence which precedes it, has drawn
me back to the opening pages again. I remember way back at the beginning of
GRGR someone offering the thought that the "screaming across the sky" was in
fact Gottfried's (unheard -- "no radio Back to them") scream which Pirate
dreams, and this again strikes me as a wonderful idea. Pirate's talent is
most definitiely disclosed as a trans-temporal one, as evidenced later on
when he becomes Frans van der Groov's "compatible host" (620); and that
00000 certainly goes beyond ("transcends"?) Luneburg Heath and 1945 as we
well recognise.

I agree with you that the "screaming" is definitely not the sound from the
rocket containing Katje's message which Pirate watches being launched from
Throsp's roof garden. But Pirate is quite confused or surprised about the
time in this opening sequence -- he looks at his watch twice (7.15, 8.16) --
and *he* seems to have figured the "screaming across the sky" in his dream
as connected to or caused by the/a rocket. Air raid sirens are indeed a
possibility, but would they pierce through the veil of sleep? They would
have become almost routine, as Teddy B. hints at (8.26); but, I can see how
this sound could have been sublimated in his dream to stand for something
else. As Kevin pointed out, I think that whatever Pirate's dream was (and
the interpretation/writing down of it is always going to be a fraught
process because it is an attempt to overlay a rational structure onto the
irrational, or non-structure) this is what he *thinks* it is, just at that
cusp of waking and sleeping where dreams and consciousness merge, and which
has been portrayed, and, quite probably it is the suppression of whatever
portents such a dream might hold (similar to that "Commando trick" he
learnt, referenced at 7.18) which render the reader's task nigh impossible
and opens up these potential interpretations galore.

I also like the way that that hysteron proteron effect (supposedly a
literary device but here deployed as proof positive of the old truth
stranger than fiction adage) of the arrival of the V2 preceding the sound is
foregrounded right from this opening sequence as well, and this links in
with the idea that it is perhaps the 00000 which screams "across the sky"
too. It hasn't hit -- yet -- but when it does who'll be left to register it?
This fits nicely with both Pirate's and Slothrop's paranoia ("operational"
and "creative" respectively) about the rocket aimed directly and personally
at them.

But I would also make the point that Pirate is no ordinary dreamer. That
"incoming mail" intimation (6.30) -- Pirate's "gift" as revealed later is
both conscious and telepathic -- has to be from Katje, doesn't it? In fact,
doesn't Pirate's ESP make him just a little bit like your common and/or
garden realist or Modernist novelist (or, "objective" historian) who
presumes to be inside the minds of her or his characters (real
people/events) and, in fact, actually manipulates these in order to create
the literary (historical) narrative and whatever morals/
messages/portents(/lessons) it might be seen to hold:

    ... might as well mention here that much of what the dossiers call
    Pirate Prentice is a strange talent for -- well, for getting inside
    the fantasies of others: being able actually to take over the burden of
    *managing* them ... (12)

Substitute "traditional criticism" for "the dossiers", and "the novelist"
for "Pirate Prentice", and, well, what have you got? That "the Firm" uses
Pirate -- innocent, or perhaps unknowing though he may be -- in the same way
that political regimes -- in terms of the conventional morality and
ideologies thereof -- use their artists, is something Pynchon seems very
concerned to try to shake off in the fourth section of the text, both by
relinquishing his own conscious control over narrative resolution and in
depicting Pirate's change of heart in going over to the/a "Counterforce".
The postmodern novel thus, explicitly, a post-Modernist novel?

Just a thought ...

best


----------
>From: Mark Wright AIA <mwaia at yahoo.com>
>

> There are lots of really tasty naturalistic bits... a splendid example
> being the contrail of the rocket that Pirate observes from the roof
> after he wakes up from the dream.  These naturalistic bits are
> assembled into a freaky and proudly unnaturalistic whole. I had an
> argument once with someone who thought that that contrail shredding
> back and forth in the wind was supposed to be symbolic of something,
> but I think not.  That is what happens to a real missile contrail is
> all.  It is this rocket that bears Katjes message, falling short of
> London proper and failing to explode, just pulverizing itself as it
> hits the ground. Whomp. All that kinetic energy converted to heat in a
> trice, causing the graphite cylinder to get toasty and burn the fingers
> of the ranking officer who hollers Oh Fuck to the cheers and laughter
> of the lower pay-grades.  I just love it. I don't think this actual
> rocket can figure at all as an element in Pirates Dream.
>
> The screaming coming across the sky is undoubtedly, in the first
> instance, air-raid sirens. It is a dream, and so the screaming can be
> all sorts of other things simultaneously, of course.  It's fun to
> speculate what such a dream element might mean to the dreaming
> character, but recall Freud's reassurance that only the dreamer can
> have enough of the right data to interpret a dream. An external
> interpreter will never get it right. But this is a fictional character
> who, therefore, isn't dreaming and can't do the interpreting, and so we
> are free to have fun interpreting ourselves, aren't we?