Pynchon as propaganda

[jbor]

I think the paragraph we've been discussing fits most aptly with that much
earlier passage with the wonderful extended chiasmus ("Dumbo ... clutch ...
clutching, dumb") and the contemporary pop cultural references to Noel
Coward's 'Blithe Spirit' (1941 play, film by David Lean produced in 1945)
and Disney's 'Dumbo':

    Everybody you don't suspect is in on this, everybody but you:
    the chaplain, the doctor, your mother hoping to hang that
    Gold Star, the vapid soprano last night on the Home Service
    programme, let's not forget Mr. Noel Coward so stylish and
    cute about death and the afterlife, packing them into the
    Duchess for the fourth year running, the lads in Hollywood
    telling us how grand it is over here, how much fun, Walt
    Disney causing Dumbo the elephant to clutch to that feather
    like how many carcasses under the snow tonight among the
    white-painted tanks, how many hands each frozen around a
    Miraculous Medal, lucky piece of worn bone, half-dollar
    with the grinning sun peering up under Liberty's wispy gown,
    clutching, dumb, when the 88 fell - what do you think, it's
    a children's story? There aren't any. The children are away
    dreaming, but the Empire has no place for dreams and it's
    Adults Only in here tonight, here in this refuge with the
    lamps burning deep, in pre-Cambrian exhalation, savory as
    food cooking, heavy as soot. (GR 134-5)

The overall structure of GR is recursive, but I also often get the
impression that Pynchon wrote long sections of narrative or expository prose
and then cut and repositioned bits and pieces from this or that continuous
section at a later stage in the novel's editing process. (As well as coming
back to passages and reimagining and rewriting them from different
viewpoints.)

The way the narrative is framed in this passage is almost identical to the
later paragraph, and the narrator's tone verges on outrage. And, again,
myths and "dreams" about heroism, surviving the war, and life after death
are juxtaposed against the irrevocable finality of these unknown soldiers'
frozen corpses.

best


on 9/4/03 10:44 AM, s~Z at keithsz at concentric.net wrote:

> Section 'COUNTDOWN' (p.753) is a nice companion to 'STREETS' (from which the
> chaplain passage is taken).
> 
> "---it is also perhaps, a Tree. . . ."
>