AtDTDA: (8) 231-232 The Fool

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Thanks, Robin - and thanks to Thelma for her wonderful reading of The Fool.

The Fool also has an important part to play in GR. For one thing, the card 
appears in this cryptical passage from the Peenemünde section:

"...but who would that be, watching so civil and mild over the modeltop? 
face all in these chromo sunset colors, eyes inside blackrim lenses which, 
like flaring nets, now are seen to have served as camouflage for who but the 
Bicycle Rider in the Sky, the black and fatal Edwardian silhouette on the 
luminous breast of sky, of today's Rocket Noon, two circular explosions 
inside the rush hour, in the death-scene of the sky's light. How the rider 
twirls up there, terminal and serene. In the Tarot he is known as The Fool, 
but around the Zone here they call him Slick. It's 1945. Still early, still 
innocent. Some of it is." (GR, 501)

Don't ask me to explain what Pynchon means here, though! The image of the 
celestial bicycle rider occurs again on page 509.

Furthermore, we're told that there's supposed to be a last photograph of 
Slothrop (after his scattering) "on the only record album album ever put out 
by The Fool, an English rock group" (GR, 742).

Note also that the number of the card is zero - a particularly important 
number in GR (Beyond the Zero, The quintuple zero, etc.), and perhaps for 
AtD as well? The card, as Pynchon reminds us in GR, has "no agreed 
assignment in the deck" (GR, 724) - so perhaps it is, in some sense, a wild 
card?

At any rate, the recurrence of The Fool in AtD once again confirms how 
densely interwoven the fabric of that novel is with that of GR.

_________________________________________________________________
PC Magazine’s 2007 editors’ choice for best Web mail—award-winning Windows 
Live Hotmail. 
http://imagine-windowslive.com/hotmail/?locale=en-us&ocid=TXT_TAGHM_migration_HM_mini_pcmag_0507