SLSL "TSR" death & sex

[William Zantzinger]

> 
> Has it been argued here that TSR is a lampoon of
> Hemingway?  I don't see it, 
> but I'm curious where the idea comes from.

Don't know. 


> 
> Secondly, where is the idea from that sex and death
> are linked in Hemingway?  

In  _Farewell to Arms_  sex and death and sex and
illness are linked. Rain is likewise linked to illness
and death. In other Hemingway tales too, but FWA is
the story that Pynchon mentions in his SL Introduction
when discussing "TSR" and FWA is alluded to in TSR. 

One obvious way in which sex is linked with illness
and death in  FWA is VD. Another is pregnancy
(abortion) and death and childbirth death. In Chapter
One the soldiers are described as "six months gone
with child" because of the way they carry their
equipment. On that same page the rain kills 7,000 men.
Another is the whores and whore houses and fresh girls
at the front in the war. 

The characters in FWA try to "drop the war" or forget
about it and make love, but it keeps coming up and
they can't escape it. One reason for this, according
to a couple of characters, is that the war never ends.
War has become WAR, the never ending war that keeps
THEM (there is THEM and THEY in Hemingway and if you
want to read a very good essay on the influence of
Hemingway and Eliot on early Pynchon, see The Gnostic
Pynchon by Dwight Edins) rich and powerful and the
rest of us poor sheep at war. 

In FWA, some characters are afraid of rain as little
kids are afraid of the dark and men are afraid of
death. Rain kills in FWA. Bombs kill. Men kill other
men with guns, the usual war stuff, but rain and snow
kill too. At times the climate prevents men from
killing with bombs and guns. 


I don't know anything about lampooning Hemingway but I
think that P took the name if his story, The Small
Rain, from Hemingway's novel FWA. In P's story the
rain is certainly not small. 

"it wasn't the small rain but the big rain..." FWA 



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