Section the Third, pg.17-19: Watch the Skies!

[Monte Davis]

Just noticed on p. 128 (Viking), in the evensong church scene:

Jessica "was remembering other Advents, and hedges snowy as sheep from her
window, and the Star ready to be pasted up on the sky again."

Bingo...

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 8:52 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> You've anticipated one of Duifhuyzen's theses: that once the White
> Visitation & Co. fixate on the map and the stars' correlation with V-2
> impacts, it doesn't *matter* any more which stars represent fantasies or
> might-have-beens rather than real Slothropian erections or copulations, or
> which stars might have been placed there after rather than before the
> BLAMM! Whatever Slothrop did, wants, knows or believes, they're going to
> treat the stars as data and him as a technical asset like Dog Vanya.
>
> As a reader who (like many others) accepted the correlation at face value
> for years -- because it drives the whole Slothrop plot from this scene and
> St. Veronica's on into the Zone -- it was wincing fun to learn how shaky it
> is, to have my nose rubbed in the evidence I'd ignored or handwaved away,
> and to realize how neatly Pynchon had made me complicit with the Firm in
> deceiving myself.
>
> On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 4:22 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Haven't yet read DuifHuyzen's piece but sure will but want to be
>> innocently 'my way' first, as per just-previous post. Here maybe
>> the map IS the territory, realistic or as a projected firmament wherein
>> psychic powers 'rule'.
>> But I've also always read it as a power out of S's control, since it is
>> (except were he to stop his assignations) so, obviously, Death against Life
>> and once aware of it/something, don't we have the necessity--chance motif
>> in full play here? He isn't 'free' to fuck anymore; his fucking is
>> necessarily conditioned, so to speak.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 12:48 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> "The stars pasted up on Slothrop’s map... a constellation... a cluster...
>>> a violet density... a nebular streaming... this glossy, multicolored,
>>> here and there peeling firmament..."
>>>
>>>
>>> Slothrop could have used colored pushpins or thumbtacks or dots of ink.
>>> Colored gummed stars might be simply because many US (and other?) kids
>>> encountered them in school, but were they routinely used in marking up maps
>>> in WWII? Would either, or both, account entirely for this concentration of
>>> insistently stellar, astronomical language? is it purely a poetic riff?
>>>
>>>
>>> The *sky* is certainly with us from the first sentence of GR on, and
>>> later there'll be rockets to a death kingdom on the moon, and Gottfried's
>>> final wishing star... but by and large the stars and significances thereof
>>> are, uhh, thin on the ground in GR -- certainly compared to M&D's
>>> omnipresent "as above, so below."
>>>
>>>
>>>  As noted before, I still find Duifhuyzen's 1981 "Starry-Eyed Semiotics"
>>> (available in pn006.pdf
>>> <http://www.ham.miamioh.edu/krafftjm/pn/pn006.pdf> at
>>> http://www.ham.miamioh.edu/krafftjm/pn/ ) the best starting place for
>>> what Slothrop's stars mean, don't mean, are mistakenly thought to mean,
>>> etc. But it doesn't really engage with the  stars _qua_ stars.
>>>
>>>
>>> Still, I'll lean on it, and on "constellations" and "firmament," to
>>> advance the quarter-baked notion that Pynchon is pointing here to astrology
>>> as much as (or more than) astronomy. Constellations are our 2-D
>>> *projections*, not real spatial groupings of stars: of two stars very close
>>> on the imagined shell of the ancient/ medieval firmament, one may be a
>>> hundred times as far away as its apparent neighbor. The same goes in spades
>>> for the zodiac, those "special" constellations that fall on the ecliptic.
>>> So there's a prosaic, "realistic" map of London that corresponds in
>>> conventional, reliable ways to the real London outside... overlaid with a
>>> projected firmament.
>>>
>>>
>>> So maybe, while the daytime narrative of Bloat's intra-Allied spying
>>> (and hundreds of pages to follow) are telling us that Slothrop's stars are
>>> the key to occult psychic powers, maybe the key to missile defense in the
>>> next War... the stars are whispering that it's all pictures in our heads?
>>> Patterns that aren't really "out there" at all?
>>>
>>
>>
>
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