BEER Group Read, the looseness thread

[David Morris]

I agree with jochen about this passage. Third person expressing Slothrop's
point of view, and direct dialogue.

But I would bet one could find passages in GR the demonstrate his narrative
description.

On Sunday, October 13, 2013, jochen stremmel wrote:

> I beg to differ, Monte. Everything in the passage you quote is told
> from Slothrop's point of view, he is the "he" who feels in the first
> sentence, and the heart is his, too. He is the one who believes in the
> next paragraph, and he is the one who asks, "Little?" in the last. The
> narrator has no access to anyone else's mind or heart.
>
> That's how I read it. A-and, to quote our host, perhaps it's only me.
>
>
> 2013/10/13 Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net <javascript:;>>:
> > "is THIS what is meant by 'postmodern'...?" Not by me, nonononono. I
> mean it
> > as very specific to TRP, trailing no clouds of theory, aligning him with
> no
> > epoch or school or trend.
> >
> > (Parenthetically,  from Michael Hofmann's NYRB review of Jonathan
> Franzen's
> > _The Kraus Project_, on Franzen in 1980's Germany: "the overbearing
> > influence of the one novel our hero packed in his suitcase full of French
> > theory -- it was Gravity's Rainbow -- and the dual terror exerted on him
> by
> > Pynchon on the one hand and Harold Bloom on the other.")
> >
> > OK, reread the end of the fully scripted, octopus-mediated "meet cute"
> > between Slothrop and Katje, p. 188 in the Viking-Penguin GR:
> > ---
> > ...Oh, that was no “found” crab, Ace—no random octopus or girl, uh-uh.
> > Structure and detail come later, but the conniving around him now he
> feels
> > instantly, in his heart.
> >         They all stay a bit longer on the beach, finishing breakfast. But
> > the simple day, birds and sunlight, girls and wine, has sneaked away from
> > Slothrop. Tantivy is getting drunk, more relaxed and funnier as the
> bottles
> > empty. He’s staked out not only the girl he first had his eye on, but
> also
> > the one Slothrop would be no doubt sweet-talking right now if that
> octopus
> > hadn’t shown up. He is a messenger from Slothrop’s innocent, pre-octopus
> > past. Bloat, on the other hand, sits perfectly sober, mustache unruffled,
> > regulation uniform, watching Slothrop closely. His companion Ghislaine,
> tiny
> > and slender, pin-up girl legs, long hair brushed behind her ears falling
> all
> > the way down her back, shifts her round bottom in the sand, writing
> marginal
> > commentaries around the text of Bloat. Slothrop, who believes that women,
> > like Martians, have antennas men do not, keeps an eye on her. She looks
> over
> > only once, and her eyes grow wide and cryptic. He’d swear she knows
> > something. On the way back to the Casino, toting their empties, and the
> > basket full of the debris of the morning, he manages a word with her.
> >         “Some picnic, nessay-pah?”
> >         Dimples appear next to her mouth. “Did you know all the time
> about
> > the octopus? I thought so because it was so like a dance—all of you.”
> >         “No. Honestly, I didn’t. You mean you thought it was just a
> > practical joke or something?”
> >         “Little Tyrone,” she whispers suddenly, taking his arm with a big
> > phony smile for the others. Little? He’s twice her size. “Please—be very
> > careful . . . .” That’s all. He has Katje by the other hand, two imps,
> > contrary, either side. The beach is empty now except for fifty gray gulls
> > sitting watching the water. White heaps of cumulus pose out at sea,
> > hard-surfaced, cherub-blown—palm leaves stir, all down the esplanade.
> > Ghislaine drops away, back down the beach, to pick up prim Bloat. Katje
> > squeezes Slothrop’s arm and tells him just what he wants to hear about
> now:
> > “Perhaps, after all, *we were meant to meet*..."
> >
> > Almost every sentence here brings a significant modulation of "who's
> telling
> > me this?" Not just in and out of a delighted/suspicious Slothrop's
> > consciousness,  but a fugue -- from a sympathetic, "naïve and
> sentimental"
> > narrator, a wised-up in-on-the-plot narrator, a coolly precise Nabokovian
> > let-the-details-do-the-work narrator ("posed" clouds, "hard-surfaced")
> -- oh
> > hell,  more narrative voices than I can count. Note the balance of 100%
> > literal accuracy and 100% cynical irony in "just what he wants to hear
> about
> > now." Would you, could you mistake this for any other writer?
> > --------
> >
> > Now read the BE description of how Maxine met Reg Despard, starting six
> > lines down on p. 12. It's doing "smaller" storytelling work: we haven't
> had
> > the buildup of Pointsman, Katje's Blicero past and her filming by Osbie
> > Feel, etc. But it's planting many of the same needles of paranoid
> > acupuncture:
> >
> > A shoreline "by now too far away to swim to"
> >
> > "The price [of the cruise] was irresistible. To anyone in their right
> mind,
> > too much so"
> >
> > A face "fatefully belonging to one Joel Wiener", the nuances of whose
> story
> > "could've saved [Maxine] some trouble down the line."
> >
> > Sentence by sentence, ask "who's telling me this?" Are we listening to
>
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