Parrots in Pynchon

[Robin Landseadel]

On Feb 25, 2009, at 9:08 AM, Great Quail wrote:

> Personally, I think that's reading too much into it.

So I guess that "We'll Always Have Parrots"

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0902&msg=132892&sort=date

was throughly O.T.T.

Great Quail:

> I think that Pynchon's "use" of parrots in his work simply follows the
> traditional literature of parrot jokes, both oral ("Hello, Frank!"  
> and "OK,
> I give up, what the fuck did you do with the ship?") and visual (think
> Looney Tunes, Disney's Iago, etc.) where parrots are gifted with  
> elevated
> levels of comprehension and speech


At the same time:

	Instead of the traditional repertoire of short, often unrelated
	phrases, the parrots could tell full-length stories - of humorless
	jaguars and mischief-seeking monkeys, mating competitions
	and displays, the coming of humans and the disappearance of
	the trees - so becoming necessary members of households, 	
	telling bedtime stories to years of children, sending them off to
	alternate worlds in a relaxed and upbeat set of mind, though
	after a while the kids were dreaming landscapes that might
	have astonished even the parrots, In Van Meter's tiny house 	
	behind the Cucumber Lounge, the kids, perhaps under the
	influence of the house parrot, Luis, figured out a way to meet,
	lucidly dreaming, in the same part of the great southern forest.
	Or so they told Van Meter.
	Vineland, 224

Ask yourself, what does this passage signify? All these little  
adjustments to the world as we know it— the very qualities that make  
the passage Pynchonian—point to magical realism by virtue of a number  
of disorientations that actively undermine "reality":

	 One Value of Chamberlain's observation is that it offers an
	 approach that does not oppose experimental (postmodernist)
	 fiction and Realism, but rather combines these in a new critical
	 formulation. I would argue, however, that magical realism is
	 different from the narrative aim or focus of novels such as
	 Waterland or Money. Magical realism implies, narratologically,
	 that the real is invested with the strange in order to reinvest the
	 familiar with meaning through the act of defamiliarization:
	 magical realism defamiliarizes the real. I would argue that
	 Postmodern Realism attempts to record the real, but that the
	 real itself has become a strange new world: mediated reaility
	 Amy J. Elias:
	 Meta-mimesis? The Problem of British Postmodern Realism.

Wise-cracking, potty-mouthed, verbally articulate parrots—check.  
Astral-travel inducing Parrots—magical realism. A small difference  
that creates a big difference. Note as well:

	The luxuriant world of the parrot on the label, though seemingly
	as remote from this severe ice-scape as could be imagined, in
	fact was separated from it by only the thinnest of membranes.
	To get from one to the other one had only to fill one's attention
	unremittingly with the bird's image, abasing oneself meantime
	before his contempt, and repeat" iGuidado cabron!" preferably
	with a parrot accent, until the phrase no longer had meaning-
	though in practice, of course, the number of repetitions was
	known to run into the millions, even as it ran listeners'
	forbearance into the ground. In thus acquiring some of the force
	of a Tibetan prayer-wheel, the practice was thought to serve as
	an open-sesame to the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra country as well,
	a point which old Expedition hands were not reluctant to bring
	up.
	Against the Day, pages 129/130


. . . more astral travel. I haven't read all that much magical  
realism, but what I've gathered from movies and other sources makes  
Pynchon's Parrots appear to me as signifiers of the presence of  
magical realism.