Re GR square brackets

[jbor]

on 19/10/01 10:31 PM, Jasper Fidget at fakename at tokyo.com wrote:

> Hmm, I guess I should concede that (without building too much into the text
> that's not offered), and the dates do pointedly break the setting.  What's
> the setting of the parenthetical passage, then?  "Underground" would seem to
> indicate London.  1966-1971 sounds like a span of dates in which GR could
> have been written.  "Do you want to put this part in?" could be a
> note-to-self.  Anyway, whatever, it's a frustrating passage.  I almost want
> to believe it was left in by mistake.

Yes it is, but I'd wager it isn't something left in by mistake, though it
could also be interpreted as a note from Pynchon to his editor which was
never intended for publication. It's more of a taunt, to the editors, to the
reader, deliberately ambiguous. "They" don't really figure at all here, it's
much more intimate: "we" and "your".

I think that in the interview the Spokesman is talking about the way
Slothrop became like a teacher or (false?) Messiah, to the Schwarzkommando
in particular (the reference to Christian on p. 738 and the mention of the
"black honor-guard on p. 739 seems to point this way). I still can't quite
understand why the joke played on the apprentices is a "Raketen-Stadt
Charlie Noble", however, or if it's the irony that a feeb like Slothrop
became so crucial to the Counterforce just like a little old lady maths
teacher became a lynchpin of the U.S. rocket program during and after the
war:

http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/NN/fno14.html

I read "the Underground" and the railway imagery in the longer parenthesis
as an extended metaphor, though for what I can't really say. The other thing
to note is that in the fragment of text just beforehand there seems to be
another self-conscious intrusion, as someone, perhaps the "author" himself,
lays out Slothrop's Tarot:

    [...] they are the cards of a tanker and a feeb: they point only to
    a long and scuffling future, to mediocrity (not only in his life but
    also, heh, heh, in his chroniclers too, yes yes, nothing like getting
    the 3 of Pentacles upside down covering the Significator on the second
    try to send you to the Tube to watch a seventh rerun of the Takeshi and
    Ichizo Show, light a cigarette and try to forget the whole thing) [...]
                                                                    (738)

The self-pity here seems parodic, almost bathetic, but what's also
interesting is that the fictional Japanese sitcom from the text seems to
have found its way into the apparently "real" world of this self-conscious
"chronicler".

best