ATDTDA p115 a paragraph of wackiness

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

"To the fiendishly clever Oriental mind, it had been but a trivial step to 
combine this paramorphic encryption with the Mikimoto process, whereupon
every oyster at the daily markets of the world suddenly became a
potential carrier of secret information.  If pearls so modified were then
further incorporated into jewelry, reasoned the ingenious Nipponese,
the necks and earlobes of rich women in the industrial West might
provide a medium even less merciful than the sea into whose brute
flow messages of yearning or calls for help sealed in bottles were
still being dropped and abandoned.  What deliverance from the limitless
mischief of pearls, what votive offering in return for it, would be possible?"

it's clear that the Chums of Chance narrator isn't Pynchon.
This paragraph is a good example of the unsatisfying metaphors
Monte Davis mentioned as present in Pynchon, though I haven't found one
yet in "Pynchon qua Pynchon" 

But such a wacky paragraph!  "the fiendishly clever Oriental mind" is
I guess borrowed from xenophobic genre fiction...
comparing pearls on the necks and earlobes of rich women to messages
in bottles tossed in the sea is, well, silly  - isn't it?

1st) because bottles tossed in the sea aren't a reliable transport 
protocol (although Jackie Chan's movie _Gorgeous_ uses one to good effect)
so for the pearls to represent mischief, they can't be doing it
by reliably carrying a mischievous message

2nd) oysters sold in the daily market for eating wouldn't be carrying 
cultured pearls, would they; I mean, if you're going to culture a pearl, would you sell the oyster without removing it?  (Lindsay's exception merely
proving the rule)

Then, the final sentence parodies earnest concern - I guess we are
supposed to still be thinking as the fiendish Oriental, "they will
pray to be delivered from these mischievous pearls, and we shall
be their Deities, demanding (a hefty ransom?) votive offerings!  Nyahahah"
...with a very slight probability of Eliot-parody: "after such knowledge,
what deliverance?" (on a par with the likelihood of James-Dickey-parody,
n'est ce pas?)

Contextually, this may be a paranoid effusion of Linday-like thought,
since he's certainly suffering and resentful.  
The message also does carry a mission from which they would gladly
be delivered, and in which they, um, don't exactly succeed...

When I write my "extremely silly person's guide to AtD"
I think this will be one of the highlighted passages.  When I read it,
I mentally earmarked it to return to sometime, to see whether I could
allow myself to chuckle at it...'cause I'm not always sure - for instance,
the Franzen metaphor of plate tectonic uneasiness that I scoffed at
a few posts ago has been quietly working in the subsurface of my
mental process and gradually changing the map...