VV(12): Foppl

[Dave Monroe]

>From W.T. Llhamon, Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in 
the American 1950's (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 
Ch. 6, "'Keep Cool, But Care,'" pp. 193-25 ...

"Foppen means in vernacular German to trick or deceive gaily, having the 
same root as the English verb to fob; also, there is a game Foppen und 
Fangen, not unlike Capture the Flag, of taunting and imprisoning opponents.  
With its diminutive l, 'Foppl' is a bitter play on genocide as a game, 
whipping and rape as delight.... Later, in Gravity's Rainbow, [Pynchon] 
would dramatize similar elements in Weissmann's launching of his lover in a 
rocket's nosecone.  In the present chapter, Foppl is catching into his 
special and shrunken worldview an assorted variety of europeans--and much 
less fortunate Africans, too--fobbing onto them the fantasies he long ago 
fobbed onto himself.  Because his world is theirs expressed extremely, the 
Europeans agree readily." (212)

Glad this one welled its way up through the cracks of the ol' Merton College 
Library whilst I was excavating for that Derrida ...
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