Section the Third, pg.17-19 spies and girls

[Joseph Tracy]

Was just reading some missed posts about the scene reconstuction of London at the time. Good to get Monte’s feedback from his Father who was there. This chapter has that quality of realism sandwiched into the stranger stuff. Girls first appear here, women really, but they are called girls because that is how the men are seeing them. Later we meet women like Jessica and Katje etc. 

…you can hear winter birds cheeping outside, busy at the feeders the girls have put up.

“Girl at the main desk, gumpopping, good-natured bespectacled ATS, waves him on upstairs”

“The stars pasted up on Slothrop’s map cover the available spectrum, beginning with silver (labeled “Darlene”) sharing a constellation with Gladys, green, and Katharine, gold, and as the eye strays Alice, Delores, Shirley, a couple of Sallys—mostly red and blue through here—a cluster near Tower Hill, a violet density about Covent Garden, a nebular streaming on into Mayfair, Soho, and out to Wembley and up to Hampstead Heath—in every direction goes this glossy, multicolored, here and there peeling firmament, Carolines, Marias, ”

“He moves back down the beaverboard maze, in the weak yellow light, against a tide of incoming girls in galoshes, aloof Bloat unsmiling, no time for slap-and-tickle here you see, he still has his day’s delivery to make. . . .”

Bloat speculates that the girls may be imagined and that has been batted around, but it seems that from what we gather in the text it is Bloat, Prentice, and Feel  who may be the ones sadly disconnected from real sexual and personal relationships as the last line in this chapter and many other lines in the novel indicate.

Life and youth are all around along with the fear and duties of war to which these felows have attached themselves.  But there are no James Bonds or even Tyrone Slothrops in this crowd.



-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l