V-2nd - Farewell to Chapter 6

[Joseph Tracy]

New Yok's catacombs- phosphorescent  shrine of the unknown cocodrilo,  
and home to Veronica, saintly partaker of the blood and body.
On Sep 13, 2010, at 5:52 PM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> 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