AtDTDA: 19 Civilized Complexities [541-543]

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

              Woevre watched her leave the room. Women looked 
          better from behind, but one saw them that way only when
          taking their leave after one was done with them, and what 
          good was that? Why did this society insist on a woman 
          entering a room face-first instead of ass-first? Another of 
          the civilized complexities that made him miss intensely the 
          forest life. . . .

A passage that caused my mind to leap to page 696 of Gravity's Rainbow°:

                    On the Phrase "Ass Backwards"

          "Something I have never understood about your language, 
          Yankee pig." Säure has been calling him "Yankee pig" all 
          day now. . . .

          ". . . . Why do you speak of certain reversals—machinery 
          connected wrong, for instance, as being 'ass backwards'? 
          I can't understand that. Ass usually is backwards, right? 
          You ought to be saying 'ass forwards,' if backwards is what 
          you mean."

          "Uh," sez Slothrop. . . .

. . . .and it then goes on—mishearing 'Liftscrewer' when intending to say 'cute 
robber', [and there aren't any 'liftscrewers'—'helicopters' in existence yet, 
don't expect me to make any sense of this]—but this passage of Woevre 
contemplating Pléiade's ass exiting the room continues with:

          . . . .Since returning to Belgium he had found only an increasing 
          number of these, deployed around him like traps or mines. The 
          need not to offend the King, to remain aware of rival bureaux 
          and their own hidden schemes, to calibrate everything against 
          the mortal mass of Germany, forevever towering over the day.

note, on pg. 543 ‡:
          
          "We saw them," said Eugénie "It was the political police. They think 
          you are one of us. Thanks to us, you are now a nihlist outlaw."

          "It's O.K.," said Kit, "it's something I was always planning to get 
          around to anyway. Did any of them bother you folks?"

          "We know each other", said Policarpe. "It's a pecular game we all 
          play.

 
          Against 


                      what looms in the twilight of the European future, it 
          doesn't make much sense, this pretending to carry on with 


                                                          the day, 

                                                                                                  
          you know, just waiting. Everyone waiting."

Note how both Woevre and Policarpe are waiting for the hammer to fall, 
beautifully expressed on page 542:

          . . . .As if parties to a secret whose terrible force was somehow, 
          conveniently, set to one side—as if to be encountered only in a 
          companion world they did not quite know how to enter or, once 
          there to exit. Here in this sub-sea-level patch of strategic ground, 
          Hostage to European ambitions on all sides, held sleepless 
          without remission, for the blows to descent. . . .

And, please to remember, that the name of the place we are in is 
'The Grand Dyke', it's all just as obvious as all that, this is the  place 
where the blows will descend, where the barriers will be penetrated, 
another world's intrusion into this one. This Dyke will not hold.

° I've got the Penguin (pronounced: pen—gwine) QP,  but in Viking's 
famously self-destructing edition—that's right, the pages fall out of 
these copies spontaneously, like some sick practical joke, as if there's 
some clause in the author's contract stipulating that just a tiny 
soupçon of glue be used in the binding of these books, insuring that 
all the pages will explode out at the reader when least expected— 
the passage is on pg. 683.

‡ :          And here we come to the bisected middle of the entire novel, 
              where Policarpe says, "It's a peculiar game we all play. Against 
              what looms in the twilight of the European future, it doesn't make 
              much sense, this pretending to carry on with the day, you know, 
              just waiting. Everyone waiting."

>From the Chumps of Choice: http://tinyurl.com/26jnxf