TRTR Chapter VI - page 202, the advantage of a classical education

[Mark Kohut]

MB writes:
Otto is clinging to sleep, even as the fly walks on his face!

Although one surely doesn't need any literary sources to use
a fly symbolically---and I like the "fly on the wall' theme.....

There are three that have occurred: In We by Charles Lindberg, American Aryan 
self-created 'hero' there
is the story of the fly which woke him as he flew over the Atlantic which might 
have saved his life....
 
Katherine Mansfield's story The Fly, in which a guy buries a fly in ink a couple 
times after
it fell into his inkwell but when rescued, cleaned itself as thoroughly as a cat 
to fly again
and then the thrid time...............he kills it...

And for some reason, I thought I remembered a fly in Sartre's Nausea Or The 
Diary of Antoine Roquentin and
a google book search confirms there is one recorded in R's diary, p.103, which 
is allowed to live......absurdly,
of course.....

Nausea, 1938 French; 1949 first editions in English....



----- Original Message ----
From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sat, May 28, 2011 11:22:57 AM
Subject: TRTR Chapter VI - page 202, the advantage of a classical education

Where are we?  We're in Otto's digs.

What is happening?
Lying in bed, Otto is, and there's, like, a housefly buzzing around.

rather than reaching for a swatter, either he or the narrator -
probably the latter, since Otto's erudition has been sounded and the
string came back up hardly wet - is able to think of multi-eyed
critters including Argus, (that eye, after Argus's death (stoned in
North Africa?) singled up and transmuted to the eye in the peacock's
tail - although if every peacock possesses one of Argus's eyes, rather
than singled up, they have multiplied to many more than a hundred) and
the fly.

this resonates with the phrase "a fly on the wall", which might
describe the narrator's role here - this was very noticeable in
Chapter 5.
Buzzing from conversation to conversation.

Otto is waking up; the girl next door is wailing about something or
other, to the accompaniment of more opera on the radio.

Rhadames before the judges is the aria.
http://ftp.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/70/70.F3d.764.95-1299.html -
probably not, eh?

the aria is from Aida.  Seems to indicate the classic conflict between
love and war, and clash of loyalties.

What *has* the poor girl done?

Otto is clinging to sleep, even as the fly walks on his face!