Slow Learner Intro. question

[jbor]

on 8/22/01 5:44 AM, MalignD at aol.com at MalignD at aol.com wrote:

> He says (if this is what you're referring to):
> 
> It may yet turn out that racial differences are not as basic as questions of
> money and power, but have served a useful purpose, often in the interest of
> those who deplore them most, in keeping us divided and so relatively poor and
> powerless.  

African-Americans, and their subjugation in U.S. society, are very much
another aspect of the "separate, silent, unsuspected world" (86.14) Oedipa
is brought into contact with in the novella, continuing a vein which runs
all the way through Pynchon's fiction from 'The Secret Integration and the
'Watts' article right up to _M&D_:

    Around them all, Negroes carried gunboats of mashed potato, spinach,
    shrimp, zucchini, pot roast, to the long glittering steam tables,
    preparing to feed a noontime invasion of Yoyodyne workers. (57.2)

(Interesting metaphor there: "gunboats", "invasion".) And:

    Around her the odour of chlorine bleach rose heavenward, like an
    incense. Machines chugged and sloshed fiercely. Except for Oedipa the
    place was deserted, and the fluorescent bulbs seemed to shriek
    whiteness, to which everything their light touched was dedicated. It
    was a Negro neighbourhood. (84.13)

A "separate, silent, unsuspected world."

Oedipa's nightmare journey through San Francisco recalls, a little, the
central scene of 'The eternal city' chapter in Heller's _Catch-22_, when
Yossarian seeks Nately's whore in the ruins of Rome. (Ch. 39 there) The way
the mute posthorn symbols manifest everywhere reminds me of the way the old
lady in Nately's whore's bombed out apartment block refers to the MPs and
carabinieri citing "Catch-22" to sanction their actions in chasing the girls
away.

The sudden stark recognition and empathy with humanity's underside that
Oedipa is brought to in her meditation on dts and DTs and the old sailor's
mattress (88-89) reminds me, in theme and tone, of the narrator's coda in
'Bartleby':

    ... hardly can I express the emotions that seize me. Dead letters! does
    it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune
    prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to
    heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and
    assorting them for the flames? For by the cartload they are annually
    burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring
    -- the finger it was meant for, perhaps, molders in the grave; a bank
    note sent in swiftest charity -- he whom it would relieve nor eats nor
    hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those
    who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved
    calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.
      Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!

best