IVIV Why 'chocolate-covered bananas? p.22

[Mark Kohut]

Great post as usual, Tore. I've wanted to read such a fine focus on bananas in his fiction for awhile. Now I have.

Thanx,

Mark

--- On Tue, 9/1/09, Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:

> From: Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com>
> Subject: RE: IVIV Why 'chocolate-covered bananas? p.22
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Tuesday, September 1, 2009, 4:16 AM
> 
> Mark:
>  
> > Bananas are a fine fun fruit might be our author's
> general authorial 
> > intent, a happy food from the warm climes so positive
> in most of his 
> > fiction. Pirate's banana breakfast in GR, amidst the
> worst with even 
> > more than the worst on the way, is unforgettable.
>  
> And not just a fine fun fruit, but also a mindless,
> countercultural 
> emblem in Pynchon's novels, eaten by Springer's crashout
> party (GR, 506),
> u.s.w. Pynchon's take on bananas is more complex in IV (and
> what an 
> absurd sentence that is!): On the one hand, he provides
> some of the 
> lore which may have motivated his appropriation of the
> banana as a 
> countercultural symbol in the first place, but at the same
> time he 
> punctures the myth of the psychedelic bananas (both on p.
> 140) - kind 
> of like when Gustav screws a light bulb into a kazoo in
> GR:
>  
> ""You fools think the kazoo is a subversive instrument?
> Here--" he
> always packs a light bulb on his daily rounds, no use
> passing up
> an opportunity to depress the odd dopefiend...deftly
> screwing the
> light bulb flush against the reed, muting it out, "You see?
> Phoebus
> is even behind the _kazoo_. Ha! ha! ha!" Schadenfreude,
> worse than 
> a prolonged onion fart, seeps through the room." (GR, 745)
>  
> Bigfoot's preference for chocolate-covered frozen bananas
> underscores
> his ambiguous nature. Bad guys traditionally don't eat
> bananas in 
> Pynchon's fiction (even though they may slip on the peels
> and fall 
> on their ass), so when Bigfoot eats bananas, he can't be
> all bad, right?
> On the other hand, the bananas are frozen, which as Doug
> reminds us
> is a no-no, plus which they are covered in chocolate, which
> can a) 
> contribute to their yumminess, and b) be seen as another
> instance 
> of the paving over of the beach:
> 
> "Under the chocolate, the bananas!"
>  
> --Graffito, p-list, September 2009
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