GR 'Streets'(was ...

[jbor]

>> Christianity - which is the ontological framework from within which the
>> chaplains are preaching - is also certain about redemption and salvation and
>> the existence of God. The narrator and the text, however, are not. There is
>> a difference. Thanks for the discussion.

on 12/4/03 1:37 AM, s~Z at keithsz at concentric.net wrote:
 
> You just make more than I about the text mentioning that some of the
> soldiers who heard the chaplains are dead now. You read that as a contrast
> with the chaplains' message of redemption. I read it as emphasizing the
> context of death in which the chaplains are bringing their message. The
> chaplains are not preaching to children in Sunday School. They are preaching
> to soldiers surrounded by the threat and reality of death. I don't think the
> text emphasizes death's finality. I think it emphasizes death's
> inevitability.

I think the emphasis is on the hope that the chaplains were trying to convey
to the men about what happens after death and the soldiers "holding on to
what they could" in the situation. I don't think the text embraces what the
chaplains were preaching at all.

> And then there is the context of the entire section in which the paragraph
> lies, beginning with the moon and snake and trees and poles of 30 y/o wood,
> and ending with the Cross/phallus and Tree and Virgin and sun and
> sovereignty.

I think that Christianity is very important in Pynchon's work, as are other
theistic and non-theistic belief systems, as also is atheism. You mentioned
the opening motto and the closing hymn. I'd say that the novel's title
(ardently secular in all of its denotations and connotations) precedes the
von Braun quote, and that there is enormous irony (to the point of outright
antagonism) in Pynchon's appropriation of old hypocrite Wernher's words. At
the end, there is that "Now everybody-" address to the audience/reader which
comes right after the hymn lyric, and for mine it is similarly drenched in
bitter sarcasm. 

I'm not sure that the moon, the "rattlesnake buzz" (a sound image) or the
"thirty-year-old wood" in the opening paragraph really have any specific
religious connotations, but I'd be happy to hear what you think these might
be. But there are bits in the 'Streets' section I don't quite get. It begins
in a bombed out building, what I assume was once one of the
garrison-churches, then the narrator (or Slothrop, for I take it that
Slothrop is the "he" who is suddenly conscious of himself "looking
*upward*") ponders that it could be any one of a number of buildings,
streets, towns he has been in recently. Slothrop, or the narrator, is lately
becoming more and more of a nature mystic, thus the bit just before the
chaplains paragraph about "some vestige of humanity, of Earth, has to
remain", and the bit further down asking if "we mightn't find some way
back?" When he discovers the fragment of newspaper he identifies the
mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb dropped onto Hiroshima as having "the same
coherence, the same hey-lookit-me smugness as the Cross does". This doesn't
seem to be a particularly positive connection at all, especially with the
the way it's also associated with a huge white penis fucking the Japanese
city. But then he sees it also as "a Tree. . . . ", and I'm not sure why.

But it's the last paragraph, where the narration seems to jump out of
Slothrop's consciousness to focus on the moment when the bomb was dropped,
which is most obscure. What, for example, is that apparition of "the pale
Virgin ... rising in the east", and what is the significance of the angle or
latitude (?) measurement of 17" 36'? The text seems to foreground the fact
that Japanese people are non-Christian. I have trouble getting a handle on
what the point is here.

best

> 
> Thank you, as well. You are fun to argue with, but most of the time I agree
> with you.
> 
> 
>