Thomas Pynchon, High Theory, and the Legacy of the Long Sixties

[jochen stremmel]

The wiki would have been enough:

 *How old IS Bianca?*

Slothrop thinks, "Bianca's a knockout, alright: 11 or 12, dark and lovely
[...]" (p.463), but how old is Bianca, really? Well ...

   - Bianca is conceived during the filming of Alpdrücken ("I think Bianca
   is [Schlepzig's] child. She was conceived while we were filming this." -
   p.395)
   - Ilse was conceived after Franz Pökler saw Alpdrücken ("he knew that
   had to be the night, Alpdrücken night, that Ilse was conceived." - p.397)
   - Leni had already given birth to Ilse when she was seeing Peter Sachsa,
   e.g. "Ilse is awake, and crying. [...] They ought to try Peter after all.
   He'll have milk." (p.163); and Sachsa is killed during a street action in
   1930 ("Taken forcibly over in *1930* by a blow from a police truncheon
   [...]" - p.152)
   - Placing Bianca's conception, say, 6 months to a year before Ilse's
   (depending on how long it took for Alpdrücken to reach the theatres and how
   long it took Franz Pökler to go see it), Bianca's birth would have been in
   1928 or 1929.
   - Slothrop meets Bianca aboard the Anubis in 1945.

Thus Bianca must be 16 or 17, yes? (Thanks to John M. Krafft and to Bernard
Duyfhuizen, of Pynchon Notes
<http://www.ham.muohio.edu/%7Ekrafftjm/pynchon.html>, for the above
sleuthing.)

–––––––––––––––––

A-and Slothrop himself gives her 12 years, the age of Juliet, if I'm not
mistaken. Seems to be a bit sloppy, that Letzler fellow.




2015-03-06 17:45 GMT+01:00 Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>:

> Still with us:
>
> "...the polymorphous perversity embodied by the sexual bacchanals aboard
> the Anubis during the book's middle actually don't [sic] seem entirely
> positive, as with Slothrop's abusive, pedophiliac encounter with the
> eleven-year-old Bianca..."
>
> As Letzler begins by calling Weisenburger's _GR Companion_ "the most
> indispensable Pynchon book," one wishes he'd consulted it: "Wrong. She has
> to be 16 or 17 years old." (2nd ed., p. 259)
>
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 3:02 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> https://www.academia.edu/11293529/Thomas_Pynchon_High_Theory_and_the_Legacy_of_the_Long_Sixties
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>
>
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