GR & the SL 'Intro': relevance to 2001

[Phil Wise]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2001 1:15 AM
Subject: GR & the SL 'Intro': relevance to 2001


>
> The opening section of _GR_ is much more than a simplistic "War is Bad"
> screed. Perhaps not even.
>
>     A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is
>     nothing to compare it to now.
>
> The paradox in the second sentence is crucial. Instead of choosing to
begin
> his WWII narrative from the point of view of the Allies as the aggressors,
> the victors -- as those who are doing the bombing -- we are abruptly and
> overtly forced to come to grips with the point of view of people like "us"
> who are being bombed, who are in dire and imminent peril of indiscriminate
> destruction from the sky, who are *victims*. It is no accident that
> virtually straight after this scene we are told that Pirate is given to
> worrying about the precise moment of the bomb's impact, "for a split
second
> you'd have to feel the very point, with the terrible mass above, strike
the
> top of the skull. . . . " (p.7), and that Slothrop's obsession is about a
> V-2 with his name written on it. (p. 25)
>

Thanks for the reading above.  There are certainly parallels.  The other
crurcial factor to mention in this context is that the "nothing to compare
it to now" may refer to the difference between the screaming of a bomb
dropped from a plane and the rocket, the novel's major symbol.  The British
had been victims from the air for a number of years at this point "that
other Blitz", which had only let up after the battle of Britain, but as the
empathy implied by Pirate and Slothrop's reaction suggests that it is the
rocket itself that has captured the imagination as something "different"
now.  It is also the fact of the rocket that pushes the narrative to start
here - the Germans invented it and were the only ones to use rockets in that
war.  To have started the novel from the POV of the Allies as aggressors
would have been to subordinate in the novel the place of the rocket in the
imagination.

Another thing to note is that we are not actually presented in the narrative
with a rocket strike from the POV of a "victim", at least not until the end,
when we are all invited to identify as that victim.  Of course, that isn't
what you implied (Pirate and Slothrop are arguably empathising with the
victims that are not-them), but I bring it up to note Slothrop's connection
with actual victims that are not-him.  What does Slothrop's apparent sexual
connection/complicity with the rocket mean in this context?  I don't have
any definitive answer to that question, but the later description of
Slothrop as having an unconscious sexual connection with his race's death
(sorry, I'm working off memory here), I have always read as being a
connective between the "we" on all sides, if only because it gets into "our"
complicity with "Their" system, and "our" destruction by it whenever the
necessity comes up for "Them".

phil