GR Slothrop's passage

[jbor]

on 29/4/03 2:20 AM, s~Z wrote:

> Just noticed this Slothropian anthem regarding Death and the nature thereof:
> 
> Adieu my dear friends, I have come to this grave
> Where Insatiate death in his reaping hath brought me.
> Till Christ rise again all His children to save,
> I must lie, as His Word in the Scriptures hath taught me.
> Mark, Reader, my cry! Bend thy thoughts on the Sky,
> And in midst of prosperity, know thou may'st die.
> While the great Loom of God works in darkness above,
> And our trials here below are but threads of His Love.
> (GR27)

This is one in a series of epitaphs written by or for Slothrop's ancestors
which appears in the text as Slothrop is looking up at the London sky, his
penis sensing and responding to the approach of the first German V-2. It's a
bit of a running joke in the novel that not just his own life, but his whole
ancestry flashes before Slothrop's eyes whenever he believes his own death
is imminent - which, paranoid that he is, is a lot of the time.

Later on, once he has nearly unravelled the complicity of both his own
family and his cultural heritage in the apocalyptic events which have loomed
into view, we are told that the "one ghost-feather" he still cannot let go
of is America. He holds onto the flimsy thread, "still thinking there's a
way to get back." (623) He can't quite "leave her", though he can see a day
when it might be possible to do so.

And sure enough, Slothrop soon does relinquish America - American religion,
American imperialism, American righteousness - and the crisis comes
precisely in the 'Streets' section, as again Slothrop is "looking *upward*"
(692), as he reflects on the terrible irony of army chaplains preaching
about redemption and salvation just before the soldiers are sent off to
their deaths, and as he sees the fragment of headline which reveals the
atrocity of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

It's no accident that one of Slothrop's last documented sightings is in the
company of Tchitcherine's old running partner, Dzabajev, also AWOL. (742-3)
The two renegades, one American, one Russian, both now stateless, are united
in a bizarre sacrament which mocks and flouts those Cold War enmities and
games of nuclear brinkmanship which are just over the horizon.

best


> Imagine this as the message from an army-chaplain to the troops in the
> STREETS paragraph, and the narrative reference to the soldiers who are dead
> now standeth not in contrast to the consolation thus offered. The hymn doth
> share with the STREETS section a notable contrast between the hope of
> salvation and the death-dealing darkness being woven above.
> 
> I do find it consoling that even the cantankerous bickering here on P-List
> below are but threads of His Love.
> 
> Selah.
>