Pynchon Pre-Birthday Bash a Regular Krupp Wingding

[Dave Monroe]

On 5/3/08, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> > "There are many wonderful foods in Pynchon's work" ...
> >
> > http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/party_hopping/pynchon_prebirthday_bash_a_regular_krupp_wingding_83930.asp
>
> The Disgusting English Candy Drill
>
> http://foner.www.media.mit.edu/people/foner/Fun/gravity.html

According to the ancients, an author has two responsibilities: to
entertain and to instruct. Here, instruction is in the subtext. These
funny episodes actually carry some heavy freight in the form of
allusions and buzzwords. In the Candy Drill, the only two wine jellies
named are Lafitte Rothschild and Bernkastler Doktor (116). These are
not just any red-wine and white-wine jellies. Rothschild is a famous
European Jewish banking and viticultural family, and Bernkastler
Doktor is a famous German wine. Bernkastler Doktor is not without a
bit of typical Pynchonian irony, suggesting Nazi doctors when it could
easily have been any other German wine. Since historically, one of the
Rothschilds died at Auschwitz, the episode starts to take on a not so
funny meaning at the subtextual level.

After Slothrop eats a handful of these "'surprises'" (116), his
"tongue's a hopeless holocaust. [. . .] 'Poisoned . . .' he is able to
croak" (118). And shortly, the narrator mentions another "famous
confection" the descriptions of whose flavor "resembl[e] the
descriptions of poison and debilitating gases found in training
manuals." In 1945, this rare confection can sometimes be found in
out-of-the-way shops among other curios including gems set "in German
gold" (119). Oddly, "Yrjö--a pretender but the true king" (119), whom
we met in Pynchon's short story "The Secret Integration," reappears in
this episode in Mrs. Quoad's reverie. King Yrjö, I have argued
elsewhere, is analogous to King Carol of Rumania, a victim of
fascist-antifascist struggles. He blends here into the ambiguity of
figures Slothrop feels "are supposed to be [. . .] our allies" (117).

So what might seem casually dropped words in the middle of the Candy
Drill are more highly charged than they first appear. We get allusions
to the German war against the Jews, weapons of mass destruction,
extermination camps, the confiscation of Jewish assets, enemies
masquerading as allies and vice versa, the whole spasm of fascism that
arose in the '20s and '30s and culminated in the war. All of this is
by way of quodlibets, a medley of unattributed allusions, as Mrs.
Quoad's name suggests. These proper nouns (names of wines), buzzwords
(holocaust, poison gases), a character from an earlier work (King
Yrjö) constitute a sinister subtext to the comical Candy Drill, a
subtext that sustains the major themes of the novel.

http://www.vheissu.info/art/art_eng_puns_hollander.htm