The revolutionaries of May

[Paul Mackin]

Both Rob's and Janos' interpretations are interesting and legit I suppose but I kind of regret piling these extra meanings on an already beautiful metaphor ending an all together beautiful paragraph though I'll freely admit Pynchon is Pynchon.

The paragraph is reminiscent for me of the vespers section where the question is asked: What does the War want?

Positively gorgeous.

Tacking superfluous meaning on a paragraph that already had meaning enough offends me.

I don't know Pynchon but I feel sure that if he's wanted to make refererence to the other two events he could have thought of a better way to do it.

Pynchon gets accused of piling allegory on allegory but I't like to think he has some restrairnt

Of course Rob and Janos may be correct--I only hope not

P

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Robert Jackson 
  To: János Székely ; pynchon-l at waste.org 
  Sent: Monday, July 27, 2009 11:25 AM
  Subject: Re: The revolutionaries of May


  On 28/07/2009, at 2:07 AM, János Székely wrote:


    Rob:

    As a native I can testify that the three "Eis-Heiligen" plus Sophie
    plus Urban (May 25) are  not specifically Polish. In GR you can find
    the German term (as it relates to southeast Germany)but we have them
    in Hungary too and as far as I remember the late Igor Zabel from
    Slovenia also mentioned them as an element of folk meteorology. They
    denote a quirk in Central European Continental climate, i.e. frequent
    mid-May morning frosts after several warm weeks (deep in the flowering
    period) that you don't have elsewhere.

    On the other hand, I have never met any texts that called the Warsaw
    Ghetto fighters "revolutionaries". It was an act of wartime resistance
    rather than something intended as a social revolution.

    János



  Hi János 


  The trusty Wikipedia blurb on the Ice Saints has it that:


  "The Ice Saints is the name given to St. Mamertus, St. Pancras, and St. Servatus in Hungarian, German, Austrian, and Swiss folklore. They are so named because their feast days fall on the days of May 11, May 12, and May 13 respectively. The period from May 12 to May 15 was noted to bring a brief spell of colder weather in the Northern Hemisphere under the Julian Calendar. With the change to the Gregorian Calendar, however, the equivalent days would be May 19-May 22."


  And then it describes the three holy days, followed by "die kalte Sophia", which Pynchon refers to at the beginning of 'In the Zone', as being specifically Polish:



  "In Poland, the Ice Saints are St. Pancras, St. Servatus and St. Boniface; St. Boniface's feast day falling on May 14. The trio are known collectively as the 'cold gardeners', the three days culminating in 'Zimna Zośka' (Cold Sophia's), the feast day of St. Sophia which falls on May 15."


      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Saints


  And the Wikpedia entry also refers to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as the "the largest single revolt by the Jews during the Holocaust." NB the use of the word "revolt". The Jewish resistance fighters in Warsaw had the support of the Polish Home Army and the Communist People's Guard.


      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_ghetto_uprising


  In that first paragraph in Part 3 where he refers to "the revolutionaries of May", Pynchon specifies a context: "In certain years, especially War years"; which is why I went looking for something that fit the bill.


  1968 wasn't a "War year", and I think that "revolutionaries" is an apt enough term for fighters in the Ghetto Uprising, which was a extremely significant social and historical event of the "War years", and which just happened to be put down by a Nazi "rear guard". According to Wikipedia, the "suppression of the uprising officially ended on May 16, 1943."


  Whatever one might think of Wikipedia, the info is generally sourced from somewhere; in just the same way that the historical detail in GR is sourced from somewhere.


  Part 3 of GR has Slothrop wandering through "the Zone", and up to the Baltic on the border of Poland.


  I think there is perhaps a resonance in the phrase "the revolutionaries of May" with les Evenements in Paris '68, and the opening paragraph is certainly metaphorical. But the textual details, and subsequent events and settings in Part 3, certainly seem to support a WWII context for the opening.


  It was an interesting and new connection that you had made which made me go back to the text and check out the details and look for potential historical referents. They're generally there to be found. As well as being "historiographical metafiction", GR is also very much a postmodernist take on the traditional "historical novel".


  all best



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