VL-IV p258 Mexico, little wordplay?

[Bekah]

You may be right about the play on words,  the double meanings there  
- especially as rain in literature typically represents some kind of  
sad emotion and almost any weather change portends change in  
characters or their relationships.

Bekah


On Feb 28, 2009, at 7:34 PM, Michael Bailey wrote:

> Bekah wrote:
>> The phrase  "a llover" means "to rain"  in Spanish.   In the book,  
>> the owner
>> is pointing to the sky and indicating that it looks like it's  
>> going "to
>> rain"  and idiomatically short for "it's going to rain."
>>
>
> well, true.  I just meant, this is sort of where's it is all over for
> Frenesi and DL and what they represent.  Even though DL presents
> herself right during Frenesi's dream of the Gentle Flood, right as she
> is hearing the "...wonderful song, the kind you heard stoned over at
> some stranger's place one night and never found again, telling of the
> divers, who would come, not now but soon, and descend into the Flood
> and bring back up for us 'whatever has been taken,' the voice
> promised, 'whatever has been lost....", (256) even though she could
> have taken DL as one of the divers and fallen into some kind of
> retrieval mode...
>
> I tend to think of the book as a comedy, but there are some earnestly
> touching moments in it.
>  This is one of them.
> If you think back to successful revolutions or social movements, like
> Castro in Cuba, or St Paul in prison, the leader returns to the fray
> after imprisonment.
> that's not what happens here.
>
> a two-stage distancing of Frenesi from what she was, a sea change:
>
> a) "...it was mercy she'd have to plead for, reduced to playing
> helpless, blaming external drug molecules for each of her failures,
> complicities, and surrenders - as indeed national governments were
> even then learning to do, with an already devastating impact on any
> humans who happened to be in their way." 260
> ---- okay, it's easy to misread that one.  My tireless Pynchon-fiendly
> eyes seized upon it and I said behold, I have caught Pynchon in a
> fucked-up sentence.  The gist that I wanted to arrive at (something
> like, nat'l gov'ts were learning to use psycho-drugs on their
> subjects, which is of course true) is not supported by the syntax.
> Nat'l gov'ts in fact, sez the syntax, are "playing helpless, blaming
> external drug molecules for their failures" -- which is the opposite
> of a concise way to say 'a war on drugs' - a euphemized confusion of
> levels that muddies the issue; violent assertions of social control,
> repression, being justified by something that can be spun as
> assistance, and described by something patently ridiculous (war on
> drugs indeed)
>
> But lo, that actually makes a sense of its own...though I'd argue for
> my original intuitive gist being a not unintentional byplay (like all
> over/a llover) because her description of the "Thorazine curtain" is
> where he goes next...
>
> 2) but the real sea change is actually laid down earlier, in keeping
> with the multidirectional flow of time in the chapter: page 259 - "So
> what difference did we make?  Who'd we save?" echoing Hector's
> question to Zoyd way back in the bowling alley.
> Not just that she stopped believing, but also has begun referring to
> them in the past tense, like she's got something else going on now.
> As she does...
>
>
> - "B groovy or B movie" - the old 24fps signoff