V.V. (12) "a pennywhistle began to play nearby"

[jbor]

    As he tightened the last half-hitch a pennywhistle began to
    play nearby, and it took him only a moment to recognise that
    the player was imitating sferics. (234.5)

    "Every time a Bondel talks back to you, it's rebellion."
    Mondaugen looked as if he might cry. (232.5)

In Charles Darwin's 'Journal of researches' written during the Beagle's
first voyage under the captaincy of Fitz Roy, there's an interesting account
of the crew's first encounter with the natives of Terra del Fuego. Darwin,
then only 22, remarks at the facility for mimicry possessed by these
"savages", how they could mimic individual words and sentences from another
language far better than the "civilised" Europeans could. He describes a
mimicking contest which sprang up spontaneously between the "Fuegians", as
he called them, and the sailors. Darwin goes on to make more general
assertions about the prowess at mimicry exhibited by other "savage" races as
well. (There is a rather nice discussion of this in Michel Taussig's
_Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses_, Routledge, NY,
1993 pp. 73-82)

Q. We know what some of van Wijk and Mondaugen's attitudes towards the
Bondelswaartz (slave-blacks?) are: dismissal, contempt, distrust, fear; but
what about Pynchon's? What does this early description of their antics
reveal? What is the effect of the irony that, rather than being scared of
the amplified sferics, they taunt Kurt with musical imitations of the sounds
as he flees?

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