SLSL 'Low-lands' racism?

[Dave Monroe]

At the risk of repeating both our selves, not to
mention Carole Holdsworth ...

--- The Great Quail <quail at libyrinth.com> wrote:
>
> The character that really grabs my interest is
> Nerissa....

>From Carole Holdsworth, "Cervantine Echoes in Early
Pynchon," Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society
of America 8.1 (1988), pp. 47-53 ...

   "One of the most interesting similarities between
the renowned knight of La Mancha and Flange is their
experiencing a mid-life crisis reminiscent of
adolescence. The Knight, for Carroll B. Johnson,
suffers from a "drastically stunted psychosexual
development." Unable to form a normal relationship
with a woman, he creates his Dulcinea: "píntola en mi
imaginación como la deseo ..." (I, 25, 246). In his
Introduction, Pynchon writes: "It is no secret
nowadays ... that many American males, even those of
middle-aged appearance, ... are in fact, incredible as
it sounds, still small boys inside. Flange is this
type of character ..." (10). Like Don Quixote,
Flange is incapable of "developing any real life
shared with an adult woman. His solution is Nerissa
.... It looks like I wanted some ambiguity here
about whether or not she was only a creature of his
fantasies" (ibid.). Nerissa, like Dulcinea, is most
beautiful, but she is a midget, a perfect incarnation
of Flange's "drastically stunted psychosexual
development": "She was a dream, this girl, an angel.
She was also roughly three and a half feet tall" (74).
   Like Don Quixote in the Cave of Montesinos episode
(II, 22-23), Flange descends the dump's ravine to act
out his fantasies. The scene in which Nerissa calls
the sleeping Dennis from the dump's shack into her
private underworld has curious resonances of an
episode of Don Quixote (II, 44) which was a favorite
of Nabokov. The Knight, during his stay at the ducal
hunting palace, leaves his bed one warm evening to
listen to young Altisidora's feigned love-songs: "...
the grated window, now shut, and the warm Spanish
night that henceforth for three centuries is to become
the breeding place of romantic prose-and-verse in all
languages, and fifty-year-old Quixote fighting one
delusion by means of another delusion —melancholy,
miserable, tempted, excited by little Altisidora's
musical moans" (Nabokov 70). This episode is followed
shortly by the unpleasant episode of the cats which
the mocking Duke and Duchess cause to be released in
their deluded guest's bedchamber (II, 46); it is
particularly interesting, therefore, that Pynchon
describes as follows the moment in which Nerissa calls
to Flange: "... a desolate hour somehow not intended
for human perception, but rather belonging to cats [my
italics], owls and peepers and whatever else make
noises in the night ...  For a full minute there was
nothing, then at last it came. A girl's voice, riding
on the wind" (72). Nerissa calls to the "tall Anglo
with the gold hair and shining teeth"; this
description first causes Flange to exclaim, "That's
me, ain't it"; he then ruefully reflects that such a
description fits his younger self much better than it
fits his current self (72-73); in like manner, Don
Quixote's niece Antonia at one point reminds her uncle
that he cannot be "valiente, siendo viejo ... estando
por la edad agobiado" (II, 6, 579-580).
   As "Low-lands" ends, Flange —watching Nerissa
crooning to her pet rat Hyacinth (76)— decides to
remain with her, to ignore for a time the real world
and its responsibilities: "let the world shrink to a
boccie ball" (ibid.). He prefers the tiny gypsy who
looks like a child playing with a doll to his fierce
"small blond terrier" (60) of a wife, prefers to play
at having a child. According to Guy Davenport, "Both
Cervantes and Nabokov recognize that playing can
extend beyond childhood not as its natural
transformation into daydreaming ... or creativity of
all sorts, but as play itself. That's what Don Quixote
is doing: playing knight-errant." [...] Like Don
Quixote, Flange seeks to be a "redeemer" (Slade 73), a
frequent figure in Pynchon's fiction; unlike Don
Quixote, he ends as "a miserable messiah" (Slade 75),
because Pynchon leaves him lost in his fantasies. Don
Quixote, on the other hand, regains his lucidity as
the moment of his death approaches: "‘Yo tengo juicio
ya, libre y claro, sin las sombras caliginosas de la
ignorancia ...'" (II, 74, 1063). "We who were living
are now dying," writes Eliot in The Waste Land; Don
Quixote recognizes this truth, while Flange seeks to
forget it through his decision to stay and “play” with
Nerissa.

[...]

Pynchon gives us a last glimpse of Nerissa: "She
looked up gravely. Whitecaps danced across her eyes;
sea creatures, he knew, would be cruising about in the
submarine green of her heart" (77).
     The emerald-green eyes of Dulcinea call to mind
still another green-eyed Cervantes heroine, Preciosa
of the Exemplary Novel "La gitanilla." It is tempting
to speculate upon the possible influence of Preciosa
upon Nerissa, who —at "roughly three and a half feet"
(74)— can surely be considered a gitanilla. The
dark-haired Nerissa is no highborn maiden abducted as
a child by an old gypsy woman, but she does mention an
"old woman" who read her fortune "many years ago"
(59-60). Like Preciosa and her enamoured don Juan /
Andrés, Nerissa is so angelically beautiful that
Flange is willing to join the strange nocturnal band
of gypsies for awhile. There is, however, a notable
difference regarding his planned stay at the dump:
while the virginal Preciosa had insisted upon a
"brother-sister" arrangement with her ardent suitor
during their travels, Nerissa begs Flange to stay with
her, even though he tells her that he is married.
(76). All in all, the dump as setting, the pet rat,
and especially Nerissa's dwarfish stature combined
with her amoral nature cause the Pynchon character to
emerge as an antitype of Cervantes's chaste,
golden-haired heroine. Yet "Low-lands" does share with
"La gitanilla" a pronounced fairy tale atmosphere. It
is interesting to recall that Nabokov considers Don
Quixote also one of the "fairy tales" without which
"the world would not be real."

http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~cervantes/csa/artics88/holdswor.htm

And note footnote 11 here ...

"The remote possibility exists that the encounter with
Nerissa is the result of Flange's having been knocked
unconscious by one of the boobytraps which Bolingbroke
had set up for the gypsies. Borges, in such Ficciones
stories as 'El Sur' and 'El fin,' suggests that part
of the action comes from the fevered imagination of
his characters...."

I'll leave it to y'all to check the online text for
Holdsworth's various sources, but ...

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, La Gitanilla (1613) ...

http://cervantes.uah.es/ejemplares/gitanilla/GITANILL..htm

http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/cervantes/english/ctxt/novexmp/6-gitall.html

http://www.unsl.edu.ar/librosgratis/gratis/gitanilla.pdf

Let me know if anyone finds this in, say, English out
there.  And on green eyes, cf. not only, say, Vera
Meroving, but see as well ...

Praz, Mario.  The Romantic Agony.  2nd. ed.
   Trans. Angus Davidson.  New York: Oxford UP,
   1951 [1933].  Cleveland: Meridian, 1956.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0104&msg=54587&sort=date

Gitanilla = gitana + menina?  Not quite, but ...

http://museoprado.mcu.es/prado/html/menig.html

http://museoprado.mcu.es/prado/html/imenid1.html

http://museoprado.mcu.es/prado/html/imeni.html

But as Rob 'n' Quail note, or, at any rate, as I'll
put my own spin on things here, the problematics of
"the exotic."  Gypsies, midgets, not to mention
green-eyed junkyard gypsy midgets.  Will be back ...

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