ATDTDA (18): 493 - "join us!"

[John BAILEY]

Yashmeen is again introduced ex parte by the three blondes Lorelei,
Noellyn and Faun, each of whose screeching is rendered with a barely
concealed phonetic disdain - "alfresceehwh" for "al fresco",
"Peeng-kyeah" for "Pinky".

 

Why the nickname of Pinky, by the way? Perhaps I missed something. I did
come up with the aunt of Elizabeth Barrett Browning who was known as
Pinkie and whose portrait is often paired with the one it hangs opposite
in a gallery in California - the Blue Boy. I don't think it's a
reference, but the "Pinkie" and the "Blue Boy" images seem a nice way of
imagining Yashmeen and Cyprian, who are from incommensurably different
worlds but through some placement by an arbitrary cosmic hand also share
something unfathomable.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Barrett_Moulton:_%22Pinkie%22
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Barrett_Moulton:_%22Pinkie%22> 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Boy
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Boy> 

 

Anyway, my point being: I think Pynchon continues his layering in this
section. The three blonde girls echo another common trope of Hollywood
university flicks - if frat house movies always feature guys in a
peeping Tom scene, uni movies centered on a female always set her up
against a trio of nasty, vapid harpies.

 

The three girls seem archetypal in this way - and I'm not sure if
there's any significance to their names, though they'd seem easily
exchangeable with names like Bambi or Heather - but they're all image
and surface, described by an unnamed interlocutor as "the girls of High
Albedo", albedo being the measure of a surface's reflection of light.
Albedo is most often used in regard to heavenly bodies or planets,
however, and in this case is further attached to the process of
photographic alchemy. Discuss.

 

Then there's the mythic aspects. No shortage of female triumvirates
there: the Greek and Roman Fates, the Graces, the Norse Norns and
Macbeth's Wyrd Sisters stemming from them.

 

Are Lorelei, Noellyn and Faun witches?

 

"Are you a nice mathematician?"

 

"Or a naughty one?"

 

Given this chapter's emphasis on the decadence of Cambridge and
university life in general - opium beer, patent wallpaper, bestiality,
polysexuality and masochism - it would be hard to imagine "good" and
"bad" as terms which find much purchase, and they'd therefore need to be
replaced by less moralistic, more instrumental terms such as "nice" and
"naughty".

 

So: "are you a good witch, or a bad one?"

 

The Wizard of Oz (1925)


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