The Harmless Yank Hobby

[Dave Monroe]

>From Umberto Rossi, "The Harmless Yank Hobby: Maps,
Games, Missiles and Sundry Paranoia in Time Out of
Joint and Gravity's Rainbow," Pynchon Notes 52-53
(Spring-Fall 2003): 106-23 ...

   "Intertextuality contributes to explaining some
more or less enigmatic passages of Pynchon's Gravity's
rainbow, like the Kenosha Kid sequences at the
beginning of episode 10 (GR 60-62).  Although a 1931
pulp Western by Forbes Parkhill hasrecently been
identified as the likely source of the name Kenosha
Kid ... the sense of the variations on the sentence
"You never did the Kenosha Kid" will be much clearer f
we read that part of the text as a
hypertextual/intertextual link to Joseph Heller's
Catch-22, where bore and depressed Major Major decides
to sign Washington Irving's name to the documents he
has to endorse, 'just to see how it would feel'
([C-22] 95).  This practical joke gets more complex
when Major Major decides to switch from Washington
Irving to John Milton (a shorter name that enables him
to double his bureaucratic output):

Major Major soon found himself incorporating the
signature in fragments of imaginary dialogues,  Thus,
typical endorsements on the official documents might
read, "John, Milton is a sadist" or "Have you seen
Milton, John?"  One signature of which he was
especially proud read, "Is anybody in the John,
Milton?" ([C-22] 100).

   "This is not so far from Tyrone Slothrop's
variations on 'You never did the Kenosha Kid....

[...]

"The Heller hyperlink hints that both Major Major and
Slothrop are jut small cogs in the vast, senseless
machinery of bureaucratized warfare, trying to enjoy
whatever fun their boring activity yields now and
then...." (pp. 107-8)

   "How can such an intertextual/hypertextual link
help us to read Gravity's Rianbow?  The metaphor of
the HTML < A > tag which facilitates internet
hypertextuality can help us ....  A hypertext link in
a webpage indicates that the present text, the
currently dispalyed page, is not self-contained or
self-sufficient ....  Breaking the linearity of our
reading ... the hyperlink is not like turning a page
... it is leaving the present text to reach a
different text ....  And it is a facultative act. 
Following a link is not compulsory....  It does not
abolish linear reading ....  It makes linear raeding
more complex, enriches or enhances linear reading,
turning the alleged linearity of the text ... into a
weblike structure with segments of linear text
connected in a three-dimensional arcitecture by means
of intertextual shunts, the links." (p. 108)

"... you can go on reading the story of Tyrone
Slothrop thinking that the different versions of The
Kenosha Kid sentence are no more than free
ssociations, idle thoughts of a bizarre mind.  You
miss something, but that does not prevent you rom
going on.  You can go back and follow the link later
....  Or you can rely on critics, whose business it is
to follow links wherever they suspect there is one. 
Still, the weirdness of scenes, characters, actions in
Pynchon's novel is a signal teh author uses to warn us
that below the printed page is an intertextual shunt
to be activated....  Once we have followed all the
links ... we might realize that Pynchon's bizarreness
is nothing more than a superficial side-effect of our
ignorance."  (pp. 108-9)

See as well ...

Rossi, Umberto.  "'The Harmless Yank Hobby':
   Mappe, Giochi, Missili e Altre Paranoie in
   Tempo Fuori Luogo di Philip Kindred Dick e
   L'arcobaleno della Gravita di Thomas Ruggles
   Pynchon.  La Dissoluzione Onesta: Scritti su
   Thomas Pynchon.  Ed. Giancarlo Alfano and
   Mattia Carratello.   Napoli: Cronopio, 2003.
   107-17

http://www.cronopio.it/pages/virus.html

Parkhill, Forbes.  "The Kenosha Kid."
   Western Rangers, Vol. 3, No. 3 (August 1931):
   6-39.

http://kenoshakid.wikispaces.com/

Thanks again, Pauls di Fillipo and Mackin ...

And, last but not least, cf., e.g., ...

"The more elaborate the joke, the more likely it is to
be thematically important; the more seemingly removed
the passage is from the manifest issues of the text,
the deeper we may have to look to find the referent.
Since text and subtext in Pynchon’s fiction take turns
carrying the thematic charge, we have to keep our
magic eye peeled ...."

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/jokespuns.htm

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