Wharfinger

[Dave Monroe]

>From J. Kerry Grant, A Companion to The Crying of Lot
49 (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994) ...

"H64.27, B44.18  Wharfinger  I am indebted to my
colleague, Dr. Sidney Sondergard, for the ingenious
suggestion that Pynchon may have consciously or
unconsciously conflated the names of a number of
seventeenth-century tragedians--Webster, Heywood,
MArston, Ford, and MassINGER--to arrive at his
fictional playwright.  Both Cowart (Art of Allusion
105) and Colville (30) point out taht the name means
the manager of a commercial wharf.  Cowart wants to
associate the name with Driblette's suicide--'one
tends to think of it as "wharf-finger"--i.e., a jetty
or pier-style wharf pointing like a finger into the
deep.'  Colville simply nots that we first learn the
name at the Fangoso Lagoon marina."  (pp. 58-9)

Citing ...
  
Cowart, David.  Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion.
   Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1980.

Colville, Georgiana M.  Beyond and Beneath the
   Mantle: On Thoams Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot
   49."  Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988.

Conscious, I don't know about, but unconscious, well,
that name does scan pretty well as a genu-wine
authentic fake Jacobean revenge tragedian name.  But
and too bad Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty was still
the end of a decade away, as it's be the perfect
Pynchonian wharf reference here ...

http://www.pitt.edu/~modart/ImageSetELEVEN/ar.97.01823.gif

However, to continue from Grant ...

"H65.14, B44.37  so preapocalyptic  The sense of
imminent apocalypse that pervades V., as well as our
own sense of fearfulness, enable us to recognize some
similarities between Wharfinger's first audiences and
those who attend the play in San Narciso.  Seed
suggests that the play itself, or at least the genre
of Jacobean melodrama, 'supplies Pynchon with a means
of dramatizing Cold War Paranoia in offering him
conspiratorial patterns to mimic' (121)."

Citing here ...

Seed, David.  The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas
   Pynchon. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1988.

Which is pretty much obviously (?) how I've reading
things here, my own tendency being to think that ...

Wharfinger = Whar-finger = war-finger 

A la, say, that proverbial finger on the button ...

http://members.xoom.com/WaveRidr/chatwavs/pushbtn.wav

http://www.barbneal.com/wav/ltunes/daffy/Daffy20.wav

Or ...

http://199.3.67.253/simpsons/anykey.wav

http://www.freeyellow.com/members2/drsheeni/stimulator.wav

Not to mention ...

"Well you know boys, a nuclear reactor is a lot like a
 woman. You just have to read the manual and press the
right button." --Homer Simpson

Ladies, Gentlemen, please!  No laughing in the war
room ...

http://www.indelibleinc.com/kubrick/films/strangelove/images/warroom1.jpg

But, seriously, folks, Pynchon, V., The Crying of Lot
49, Gravity's Rainbow, at LEAST, as both
preapocalyptic, preapocalyptically paranoid, and as
problematzing the preapocalyptic, as problematizing
preapocalyptic paranoia ...

 

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