Fitzgerald's TN

[alice wellintown]

Sorry, but I can't help but toss books into this Schiller Theater.
Remember the hand in opening of Chiller Theater? Was it a Thing or an
Idea or better, an Ideal? Thing was a Hand on The Adams Family, and
Thing One and Thing Two upset the innocense, the naive view of
children, their play....well, anyway, if we must Hem our Way in to
Schiller Theater with naive and sentimental pathos, we can examine a
poetic use of Nature, in the Rain that Pynchon, when a Slow Learner,
as writer, though at this point a Strong Reader (Bloom), perhaps too
self-consciously aware of his anxiety of influences, tags onto "The
Small Rain" in the allusions to Hemingway and Eliot. There is is, like
a bubbling breakout on the nose or a teenage boy at the prom, a
blemish so boneheaded and naive, an attempt to make it literary with
rain imgages from TWL and FWA, and ToC  (SL.4-6). . But is that all it
is? Pynchon says that the character may have carried the day, that,
and the theme, the chiller theater's very own Death, of course, but
then looking back P decides the only thing he can admire is the class
struggle, and how the lower ranks are heroic while the officers are
assholes. The language, and the other weaknesses, the critical noises
fro this of that camo that was giving mixed signals are all quite
interesting, but the Rain Images are the rub. The sun, the dry bones
whitening under the sun, or down at the bottom of the sea where the
sailor had eyes of pearl.

Looking into WL would take us on digressions that could be fun, but
Heming in our way with that Farewll to Arms may be worth more than
Schiller. For Hemingway, so the character at the end of "A Small Rain"
claims, hates the rain. But maybe Pynchon, Slow Learner, though Strong
Reader, has it wrong. The Rain is just water from the sky. No love or
touching respect merely because it is Nature. But isn't hate, like
love and touching respect, naive and sentimental as well?

That first passage of FWA is striking. Call it plain style
reestablished, it is as American as apple pie in style, and yes, the
men are pregnant with arms, walking in the killing rain. That late in
the novel a soldier's lover and child. will die from the gas, not the
rain, is sentimental, our hero, cool under pressure, naive. The
iceberg, hidden in the images beneath the surface, sink his illusions,
the war is his mother and They may not make the rain, but They can
make a muddy, bloody,  mess of Nature.