MDMD 'The All-Nations Coffee-House' (299.32)

[Doug Millison]

re Dolly's reference to 'The All-Nations Coffee-House' (299.32)

here's something I posted back in the first P-list reading of M&D:


>Otherwise, Dixon's visit to the All-Nations echoes the scene in GR when
>Major Marvy, having received the 2 1/2 ounces of cocaine from Bodine, goes
>to the brothel named House of All Nations, where he winds up with Manuela
>and entertains his racist and militaristic metaphors of penetration
>("...visions go swarming, violent, less erotic than you think--more
>occupied with thrust, impact, penetration, and such other military values.
>Which is not to say he isn't "), wears Slothrop's pig costume to escape
>when the place is busted, and gets himself gelded in Slothrop's place as a
>result.
>
>The set-up here in M&D suggests that Dixon's fun-loving interest in dusky
>damsels may not be all that different from Major Marvy's -- at least in the
>same ball park, we don't get the nitty-gritty detail of Dixon's exploits
>with the women the way we see Marvy at work with Manuela in GR.  But the
>parallel is there all the same. The All-Nations cafe features "serving
>girls....costumed in whimsical versions of the native dress of each of the
>coffee-producing countries,-- an Arabian girl, a Mexican girl, a Javanese
>girl, and according to Dolly, a Sumatran girl as well".  Our narrator tells
>us the girls present "a constantly shifting Pageant of allegorical Coffees
>of the World, to some ways of thinking , in fact quite educational." But,
>given the echo of the GR whorehouse scene, these girls in native costume
>may represent something more, especially as we see that they are
>"attracting a core Clientele louder, beefier, and altogether less earnest
>than Dixon by now expects to find in Philadelphia."
>
>Attractions of these dark-skinned girls (sex) identified with coffee
>(caffeine) and we're back to a couple of Pynchonian themes packed into this
>little scene:  the European male romping in the third-world flesh pit;
>given coffee's importance in the mercantile system of trade, we've got the
>theme of economic exploitation, too.
>
>Interesting, too, that Dolly -- here seen not as the sexy Franklin groupie
>or Mason and Dixon bait (299.8 "she's certainly not as eye-catchingly
>rigg'd out tonight as he's seen her before"  and she seems Dixon's equal in
>surveying skill), is the one to peg Dixon as the type to be interested in
>third world girls:  "Rather took you for an All-Nations Lad myself."
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9710&msg=20902&sort=date