Sloth-rop (was Re: Holocaust as metaphor?

[jporter]

> From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
> Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 07:39:17 +1100

> 
> Just reread some of the Bianca/Slothrop bits again and can't get to *any*
> real conclusions at all. It's that parenthetic reference to Sundial just
> before these quotes which gets me every time because 'we', the text implies
> (i.e. text and reader), are suddenly "[l]eaving Slothrop in his ... red-ring
> manacles, comicbook irons", which are the Harvard crew sox (his, no doubt
> liberal, education), "city reflexes" (the mores of U.S. urbanised society, +
> his sublimated lust for subdeb cuties like Shirley T. one could also infer),
> along with the hero-legends he has grown up on (i.e. D.C. &c comic
> superheroes) -- in other words his cultural conditioning.

 >Things suddenly
> start to get mysterious then, and the rest of it seems like a self-conscious
> and extra-diegetic address from the "author" to a/the reader along the lines
> of "the years of grease and passage, 1966 and 1971 ... Do you want to put
> this part in?" parenthesis at 739. In other words, Slothrop's *out* of the
> equation from the beginning of the third paragraph up. (472)

Yes, except for that third person *he*- "No.How can he believe that..." Is
that *he* Slothrop? Or, "the author," describing himself in the third
person? In which case, who are *They,* some collection of mutually
co-dependent sub-routines framed by, or conspiring against *he?* Maybe their
mutual co-dependency *is* the conspiracy, and *he* just a figament of that
covert action, a higher level enabler.

Or, *he* could be just another level, a particular platform, or scale. It
gets back to the question of P.O.V. again, but the simple notions of 1st,
2nd, 3rd person points of view are not sufficient to describe the vision
here. Different *scales* seem required for this text- Slothrop chugging up
and down those ladders... and not only inter-scalar, but cross temporal as
well- It's _The Art of Fiction_  in an accelerated frame, i.e., a strong
gravitational field. One level's form is another level's content, as the
text jumps, rather abruptly, from one scale to the next.


> 
> The description of Sundial's powers for me works as an analogy for Pynchon's
> literary method, his narrative agency ("The frames never enclosed him ... "
> etc), whether deliberately meant as one or no.

*Sundial* is filled with latency, but coming from "across the wind" reminds
me of Native American descriptions of the first europeans to land on their
shores. Sundial may be a self-portrayal of colonial *will* (eventually to
father both Archer and Theale) appropriately grandiose for the comic book
sensitive, and helping prepare his reflexes for his ex-patriation and
?pre-ordained? re-unification with european culture.

> 
> But along my trail I happened to catch the working out of Bianca's probable
> age at Tim Ware's site:
> 
> http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/gravity-f.html
> 1. JK and BD's sums are legitimate, but I could do the same sums and make
> her out to be just turned (or even turning) 15.
> 
> 2. Slothrop *believes* her to be only "11 or 12".
> 
> (Not that you're arguing this aspect of it of course, but it's a question
> which intrigues me.)
> 
> Still haven't come across Slothrop's "Pilate" self-reference again though.

You won't. It's not even an interpretation, but closer to the way:

    "Sure he'll stay for awhile, but eventually he'll go, and for this he is
to be counted, after all, among the Zone's lost."
 
made me feel- as if he were somehow making a choice that would seal his
fate. Hence, my querie- was it all predestined? (or could Bianca have saved
Slothrop from himself? or they from eachother?)


jody