COL49 Naming Names

[jbor]

Jesùs Arrabal (82-3): As well as conflating the name of the Spanish
playwright Fernando Arrabal and Jesus, the protagonist of Arrabal's first
major play, _Le cimetière des voitures_, I like the way that the grave over
the u in the  character's "christian" name alters the pronunciation
slightly. I can hear "Je, Zeus", or "I, Zeus", which in terms of "projecting
a world" and, say, Blake's drawing of an all-powerful God with compass and
protractors, sparks off an interesting interpretative flight. Interestingly
also, Arrabal was a Ford Foundation award recipient in 1959 and travelled in
America in that year, just as, I presume, Pynchon was putting the finishing
touches to his own application to that institution.

K. da Chingado and Company (publishers of a "corrupt" edition of the
Bortz/Vatican edition of the Wharfinger play, 104): I can hear this as
onomatopoiec, "da CHING" as the sound a cash register makes, denoting a cash
windfall of some sort, and which has been taken up as an idiomatic
ejaculation in latter-day movies and sitcoms as such.

Many of Pynchon's names are onomatopoeic, such as Helga Blamm, Hilarius's
nurse. One of my favourite lines in the novel is this one:

"Well he's shot at half a dozen people," replied Nurse Blamm ... (92)

At times the narrative actually seems to *turn into* a Porky Pig cartoon!

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