GR '(S)tree(t)s'

[jbor]

on 17/4/03 6:33 AM, Scott Badger at lupine at ncia.net wrote:

> Unfortunately, my copy of Grave's WG is presently out of reach, but I wonder
> if anything might be gleaned there....
> 
> Found this at http://www.serve.com/Lucius/Graves.index.html :
> 
> ...The whiteness of the Goddess has always been an ambivalent concept. In
> one sense it is the pleasant whiteness of pearl-barley, or a woman's body,
> or milk, or unsmutched snow; in another it is the horrifying whiteness of a
> corpse, or a spectre, or leprosy.... [p. 361]
> 

Perhaps. I was thinking more of the associations the text itself has Enzian
make with whiteness and the name "Blicero":

    ... Enzian's found the name Bleicheröde close enough to
    "Blicker", the nickname the early Germans gave to Death. They
    saw him white: bleaching and blankness. The name was later
    Latinized to "Dominus Blicero". Weissmann, enchanted, took
    it as his SS code name. (322)

To me, the idea that it suddenly dawns on Slothrop that "it is also,
perhaps, a Tree. . . . " adds to the scene. It's as if he's starting to
think that the newspaper photo is mocking *him* particularly, as if it had
been placed there on purpose just to trip him up, that the page has been
ripped in just such a way to catch his attention and make him have to puzzle
out what it's referring to. (Fits with his propensity to paranoia, to the
trademark Pynchonian themes of bizarre conspiracies and of inanimate objects
being credited with volition. And, of course, to the fact that GR is a
historical novel which addresses human atrocities, such as the bombing of
Hiroshima, which were committed during WW II, just as a jab in the ribs for
those readers who view it all as just a fairy tale and a bit of jolly fun.
And it adds a certain - je ne sais quoi, let's say spine-tingliness for want
of something a bit less banal - to my reading of the book.)

best