V-2nd - Farewell to Chapter 6

[kelber at mindspring.com]

We're officially supposed to be talking about Chapter 7 starting today, but wanted to give a nod to this passage in Chapter 6, Part II, a wonderful antidote to Fina and her predilection for a good gang-banging:

 p. 155 (Harper Perennial):

"... because in some prehistoric circuit of the alligator brain they knew that as babies they'd been only another consumer-object, along with the wallets and pocketbooks of what might have been parents or kin, and all the junk of the world's Macy's.  And the soul's passage down into the toilet and into the underworld was only a temporary peace-in-tension, borrowed time until they would have to return to being falsely animated kids' toys.  Of course they wouldn't like it.  Would want to go back to what they'd been; and the most perfect shape of that was dead -- what else? -- to be gnawed into exquisite rococo by rat-artisans, eroded to an antique bone-finish by the holy water of the Parish, tinted to phosphorescence by whatever had made that one alligator's sepulchre so bright that night."

Aside from being a pre-reference to the Kenosha Kid sequence in GR (passage down the toilet), this is one of those mind-expanding Pynchon passages that seems to tie together genocide (pre-referencing the upcoming Herero massacre sequence in Chapter 9) and consumerism, foreshadowing his critique of the military-industrial complex, but reminding us as we read it that spirituality's hard to come by in modern brightly-lit consumer society.  One has to go dark and deep underground to find it - Under the cobblestones, the beach!

Laura