Six British Candies

[Dave Monroe]

http://www.theawl.com/2012/09/six-british-candies

... According to the ancients, an author has two responsibilities: to
entertain and to instruct. Here, instruction is in the subtext. These
funny episodes actually carry some heavy freight in the form of
allusions and buzzwords. In the Candy Drill, the only two wine jellies
named are Lafitte Rothschild and Bernkastler Doktor (116). These are
not just any red-wine and white-wine jellies. Rothschild is a famous
European Jewish banking and viticultural family (with their fine
Bordeaux [Chateau Lafitte de Rothschild] routinely winning medals for
over a century), while Bernkastler Doktor is a famous German wine with
its own pedigree. Bernkastler Doktor is not without a bit of typical
Pynchonian irony, suggesting Nazi doctors when it could easily have
been any other German wine, say, Riesling, or Gewurtstraminer. Since
historically, one of the Rothschilds died at Auschwitz, the episode
starts to take on a not-so-funny meaning at the allusive, subtextual
level.

... Slothrop's suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous and
disgusting English candies and wine jellies in this early section of
Gravity's Rainbow seems to have a weightier meaning than previously
noticed, involving many of the threads that center around Slothrop.
His suffering is a metaphor or perhaps a prefiguring, for what no-one
(in the novel) knew for sure at the time: Millions of people (Poles,
Jews, Gypsies, Christian German hmosexuals, German Communists, aged
and infirm Germans, as well as aged and infirm Christians from the
conquered nations) were being rounded up and forced, en masse, into
gas chambers where millions perished.  It is a very deft, if highly
mocking, treatment of what it might have been like to inhale those
truly lethal toxic fumes, done tongue in cheek under the cover of what
has come to be called Pynchon's "Disgusting English Candy Drill,"
where Slothrop inhales merely faux toxic fumes generated by Mrs.
Quoad's candies.

... After Slothrop eats a handful of these "'surprises'" (116), his
"tongue's a hopeless holocaust. [. . .] 'Poisoned . . .' he is able to
croak" (118). And shortly, the narrator mentions another "famous
confection" the descriptions of whose flavor "resemble the
descriptions of poison and debilitating gases found in training
manuals." In 1945, this rare confection can sometimes be found in
out-of-the-way shops among other curios including gems set "in German
gold" (119). Oddly, "Yrjö-a pretender but the true king" (119), whom
we met in Pynchon's short story "The Secret Integration," reappears in
this episode in Mrs. Quoad's reverie. King Yrjö, I have argued
elsewhere, is analogous to King Carol of Rumania, a victim of
fascist-antifascist struggles. King Yrjo blends here into the
ambiguity of figures Slothrop feels "are supposed to be [. . .] our
allies" (117).

... So what might seem casually dropped words in the middle of the
Candy Drill are more highly charged than they first appear. We get
allusions to the German "war against the Jews," weapons of mass
destruction, extermination camps, the confiscation of Jewish assets
and melting what was appropriate into "German gold," enemies
masquerading as allies and vice versa, the whole spasm of fascism that
arose in the '20s and '30s and culminated in the war. All of this is
by way of quodlibets, a medley of unattributed allusions, as Mrs.
Quoad's name suggests. These proper nouns (names of wines), buzzwords
(holocaust, poison gases), a character from an earlier work (King
Yrjö) constitute a sinister subtext to the comical Candy Drill, a
subtext that sustains the major themes of the novel.  The subtext is
the counter-narrative that goes against the grain, or in the opposite
direction, of the silly narrative.

http://www.vheissu.net/art/art_eng_jokes_hollander.htm

Thanks, Max Nemtsov!