V.V. (8) Geronimo!

[Dave Monroe]

Now, unlike some other things here, I actually like
this, and not only because it elaborates (ejborates?)
on one of my own little observations here, not only
because it shows we can work together here, keep that
ball in play, as it were, but because it's yet another
example of just how fecund those Pynchonian texts can
be, intra-, inter- and maybe even extratextually. 
Layers on layers, folded with night unto
croissant-like density (cf. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold:
Leibniz and the Baroque?) ...

A-and here's perhaps another layer, another fold. 
>From Lewis MacAdams, Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop
and the American Avant-Garde (New York: The Free
Press, 2000) ...

... Kerouac was only a couple of years away from
earning an honorable discharge "with indifferent
character" from the navy after running across the
parade ground at the Newport training station,
screaming "Geronimo!"

... Kerouac, the navy, "indifferent characters," all
hanging around that Pynchonian alley, no?  "Geronimo!"
...




--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
>     "Geronimo is a tourist," Angel said. "He wants
> to go down to San Juan
>     and live in the Caribe Hilton ... "  (139.26)
> 
> Apart from the literal explanation for Angel's
> remark (i.e. they are in
> "Little Italy") there is a deliberate sub-text at
> play here I think. The
> displacement of Native Americans from their land by
> the "white" colonists is
> a constant theme throughout Pynchon's fiction.
> Benny, innocent, has just
> observed to Geronimo that it "isn't like it was a
> foreign country", but he
> does not really understand that for both Angel and
> Geronimo here in the very
> metropolitan hub of these "United States" indeed it
> *is* "like it was a
> foreign country." The "other", the "non-white" --
> here represented by the
> Puerto Rican, Angel, and the Native American,
> Geronimo -- are marginalised,
> exploited, underpaid, overtaxed, discriminated
> against. Angel's quip is
> gently ironic, and without rancour (for Benny is as
> much an outsider as they
> are, he realises, and a loyal friend). But what he
> draws Profane's (and I
> doubt that Benny even really takes the hint), but
> more importantly *our*,
> attention to is that Geronimo, the Native American,
> has indeed become a
> "tourist" in his own land. It is remarkable how one
> word, amidst what is
> seemingly throwaway drunken banter and with the
> dialogue and behaviours all
> around it ringing so true and natural, can augur so
> powerful a
> socio-cultural commentary.


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