MDDM Ch. 7 Jethro's tent

[jbor]

Yes, hopefully someone will be able to shed some light on why the Biblical
Jethro (as opposed to the hillbilly one) should be copping such a bad rap.
(The first time I read this bit it brought 'Seven Brides for Seven Brothers'
to mind.) But neither Mason nor Dixon are in the market for a wife --
neither has been slewing anyone, let alone Egyptians -- and it's early days
and Johanna's venality vis a vis Austra hasn't yet been exposed. The three
girls are depicted as blond, busty and teasingly sluttish, and the action
"under the Table-Cloth" and hot blood all round is what is being directly
linked to the analogy. If it's simply Wicks' metaphor then the accompanying
aside about "Elves" is strangely incongruous. But why would Wicks have it in
for Jethro and his daughters anyway?

A couple of pages later when Cornelius styles himself as Job it's easy to
work out what's going on, because the narrator explicitly demurs. But all in
all the Old Testament references here seem sort of gratuitous.

Until I checked I had no idea about "Nimrod" either ... the name of a Green
Day CD .... 

best


on 12/10/01 11:42 AM, John Bailey at johnbonbailey at hotmail.com wrote:

> I'd like to know the very same thing. I can't find any connection. In fact,
> everything I've read says that Moses found a *spouse* in Jethro's tent,
> which is kind of different.
> 
> Also, that nimrod reference (of Cornelius Vroom being a nimrod, made me
> laugh having still been a teen in the early 90s, somewhat different meaning
> there) I checked out what the origin of the word is...It's Biblical! Old
> Testament as well. Why so many OT references in this chapter? Although I
> suppose there have been quite a few in previous chapters, they are quite
> piling up down at the Cape, aren't they. I think it's significant, but I
> don't really know what to do with it all.
> 
> Anyway, Nimrod in this sense means a hunter, from the Biblical Nimrod who
> was a legendary hunter and king, the first who claimed to be a "mighty one
> in the earth." Babel was the beginning of his kingdom, which he gradually
> enlarged (Gen. 10:8-10). The "land of Nimrod" (Micah 5:6) is a designation
> of Assyria or of Shinar, which is a part of it.
> 
> Also, it's interesting that the online dictionary which I use suggests that
> the informal meaning of nimrod, ie. an idiot, probably comes from Bugs Bunny
> calling Elmer Fudd a 'poor little nimrod', he being a hunter and all
> ("Shhhh...I'm hunting dictionaries"), and considering that Nimrod was a
> descendant of Ham, it's a very nicely textured Pynchonian kind of joke for a
> Bugs cartoon, which I realise are very interesting in their own right, but
> wow. And there are certainly other explicit cartoon references in M&D (not
> to mention GR & VL), so I'm wondering if P wasn't aware of this cartoon when
> he was writing M&D. Maybe Cornelius is a bit of a Fudd-like figure.
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> From: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
>> To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Subject: MDDM Ch. 7 Jethro's tent
>> Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2001 10:59:44 +1000
>> 
>> But where does the signification that Thomas, John and Terrance mentioned
>> about it being a "whorehouse" or a "lewd harem-type scenario" come from?
>> The
>> story is certainly in the Bible: Jethro had seven daughters (cf. 60.10),
>> and
>> one of them, Zippo'rah, he gave in marriage to Moses. They had a son called
>> Gershom, a name which pops up later in the novel in a seemingly unrelated
>> context.
>> 
>> The Vroom household certainly resembles a whorehouse, but who is making the
>> connection between "Jethro's tent" and whorehouse at this point? The writer
>> of _Exodus_? Moses? Some folk saying? Mason &/or Dixon? The narrator?
>> Pynchon?
>> 
>> best
>> 
>>