You never did the Kenosha Kid? Down the toilet

[jbor at bigpond.com]

>> Slothrop's sneakier resistance strategy starts to intercede when he 
>> makes the decision to plunge down the toilet. Everything up to that 
>> point in the interrogation has been a truthful recount of a real 
>> incident from Slothrop's youth, but there's a hinge-point there on p. 
>> 63 where Slothrop is deciding whether or not to "follow" his 
>> harmonica into the toilet (I'm assuming he really did lose it back 
>> then in the Roseland Ballroom in the way he describes, but I don't 
>> believe he really dived into the toilet to retrieve it. It stayed 
>> lost.) The repeated question -- "Follow?" -- interrupts the flow of 
>> the account, and there's a deal of equivocation and sidetracking on 
>> Slothrop's part right at this point. There's a decision to be made, 
>> both back there in the toilet, but also in his drugged-out state in 
>> the hospital in the present.

On 07/09/2005, at 7:19 PM, jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> But eventually Slothrop does takes the plunge, unleashing deep-seated 
> xenophobic, homophobic and racist ("Some of it too must of course be 
> Negro shit, but that all looks alike." p. 65) impulses.

Cf. also the way that Slothrop in his imagination conjures up "the 
sound of a whole dark gang of awful Negroes come yelling happily into 
the white men's room, converging on poor wriggling Slothrop, jiving 
around the way they do singing, 'Slip the talcum to me, Malcolm!' 
[...]" on p. 64.

> Interestingly, the Roseland Ballroom episode is taking place in 1939, 
> if we can date it from Bird's improvisations on 'Cherokee' in New 
> York. But when, upon arrival at his destination, Slothrop perceives 
> that "something else has been terribly *at* this country", and it 
> feels to him as if "there is a Pearl Harbor every morning, smashing 
> invisibly from the sky" (67), we've jumped into a post-1941 timeframe.
>
> With Slothrop's decision to go with the flow, so to speak, the "real" 
> memory induced by the Sodium Amytal has been usurped by a fantasy 
> originating from within Slothrop's present-time imagination.

best