GRGR Finale: Walt Disney in *GR* (is also Re: The Last Nazi Rocket Scientist

[jbor]

There are a couple-three references to ol' head-in-the-freezer himself in
the novel, most tellingly imo the reference to that "diffuse, though
rewarding, work", the

     ... Closet Intellectual Book, *The Wisdom of the Great Kamikaze
     Pilots*, with illustrations by Walt Disney -- screaming, hairy-
     nosed, front teeth in white dihedral, slant-eyed (long, elaborate
     *curlicued* shapes) round black licorice dog-nosed *Japs*, zoomin'
     through ev'ry page! (680.26)

But it seems to me that Pynchon's contempt here is directed more towards the
stereotypes Disney unleashed on generations of children than at any public
support which might have been given to the US Space Program on his tv slot
in the 60s. Pynchon's parody of Disney's graphic style emphasises the
simple-minded moral overtones of the cartoons; the adoption of an
enthusiastic colloquial idiom near untrammeled by punctuation or pause
(reifying, perhaps, the subliminal conditioning which might occur as an
impressionable young child breathlessly scans the frame) travesties the
loud-mouthed racist bravado such imagery embodies and engenders.

But, should one indeed wish to pursue a WvB connection, one might have more
luck with the references to Disney's movie 'Dumbo', one of drug-ravaged
Osbie's favorite movies (106). The gravity-defying elephant would seem to
possess a not insignificant amount of symbolic potential in this regard.
Again, however, the subsequent reference to "the lads in Hollywood telling
us how grand it all is over here, how much fun, Walt Disney causing Dumbo
the elephant to clutch to that feather" (135) seems more concerned with
castigating stereotypical representations of war. (That extended chiasmus of
"Dumbo [...] clutch" to the dead soldiers' frozen hands "clutching, dumb" to
their good luck charms is one of the most masterfully poetic reveries in the
whole novel imo.)

But it might also be worthwhile to consider Bodine's reference to this movie
much later in the narrative, when he gives the piece of Dillinger's
bloodstained shirt to Slothrop as a talisman, a gift of "physical grace"
which the Seaman now no longer needs. Bodine tells Slothrop: "it worked for
me, but I'm out of the Dumbo stage now, I can fly without it. But you.
Rocky. You. . . . " (741)

best