BtZ42, 21: Slothrop backstory in UK

[Ray Easton]

Yes.

(I find myself wishing there was a "Like" button -- which speaks poorly of 
the ways I've been spending my time of late.)

Sent with AquaMail for Android
http://www.aqua-mail.com


On April 6, 2016 6:15:40 AM Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

>>is Slothrop  is a reliable narrator?
>
> The diction of the first quotation is Slothrop's, and I could question it
> as "his version." But the "three years" below has free-indirected its way
> into a more ornate, faintly old-fashioned narratorial voice which goes on
> to disparage his "barbarities" and "lapses."
>
> It's the same voice that starts us caring about the Tyrone-Tantivy
> friendship, which told us about the history of the bananery, and which will
> present the Slothrop genealogy coming up on 26, and so on. So if it isn't
> reliable (within the arena of fiction, of course), we're going to have to
> put "well, maybe" on a lot more than just Tyrone 1940-1944.
>
> I'm not prepared to do that. GR's narrator is (or if you prefer, GR's
> narrators are) sly, tricky, oblique, sometimes more addled than Tyrone at
> St. Veronica's. But there remain distinguishable degrees of credence and
> doubt, or we slide into "it was all a dream, and we have no way of really
> knowing he was Tyrone Slothrop of Mingeborough rather than Maureen Perkins
> of Pasadena." In which case I'm bored, and gone.
>
> On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 10:24 PM, Gary Webb <gwebb8686 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> The question to ask is wether or not Slothrop  is a reliable narrator? How
>> much of what he says is true? We generally want to take what he says to be
>> true at face value, and maybe it is... But when people go back to verify
>> anything about him, it all gets distorted, e.g. SEZ WHO ...
>>
>> On Apr 5, 2016, at 9:47 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> If it was maybe uncommon enough to be notable (if not strange/aberrant)
>> that he was there before the first Blitz, despite there being no overt
>> reason why that'd be the case, maybe we're sposed to feel like/wonder if
>> this is him preemptively gravitating toward the sites of future
>> rocketfalls like the docs suspect...Beyond even the zero of the start of
>> the US's involvement in the war. Gravity pulls him through
>> military-bureaucratic probability...
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 8:38 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I'm not positive: Jove *does* nod. There's that "seventh Christmas of the
>>> War" (126), best explained as a simple miscount... and the much-argued
>>> ambiguities of Bianca's age, which IMHO result from a mixture of
>>> carelessness and deliberation.
>>>
>>> But yeah... Slothrop in London "comes into focus" with the first V-2, and
>>> the book's main narrative with his visits to V-2 impact sites, and Them
>>> taking an interest in his map. As best I remember, this page is almost all
>>> we know of him between Harvard and summer 1944. I can imagine Pynchon
>>> wanting Slothrop to have experienced the 1940-41 Blitz, as a
>>> baseline/contrast to heighten what's different about the rockets, and just
>>> accepting the resulting timeline...
>>>
>>> But I can also imagine Pynchon wanting us to wonder: Did *They* want
>>> Slothrop to experience the first Blitz as a baseline...?  Heh-heh-heh...
>>>
>>> I may have been primed for this by knowing very little about what my
>>> father did as a Marine war correspondent in Londonderry in 1942-43. The
>>> USMC detachment there provided shoreside security for a large joint
>>> convoy/naval base, and I know he did the routine news releases about a
>>> promotion for Cpl. Morris of New Orleans, high morale, training, toys for
>>> the local orphanage, etc. But given the tight security around all Atlantic
>>> shipping (because of U-boats), he couldn't have been able to write much
>>> about the central activities -- the reason for being there -- of the USMC
>>> or USN. So what *was* he doing? Heh-heh-heh...
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 8:18 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Wow. Nice find. I wonder under what pretense Slothrup believes he is
>>>> serving in the UK before any formal US involvement.  This is surely not an
>>>> accident by Pynchon.  He's too precise for such a big gap to be accidental.
>>>>
>>>> David Morris
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Tuesday, April 5, 2016, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> "A lot of stuff prior to 1944 is getting blurry now. He can remember
>>>>> the first Blitz only as a long spell of good luck."
>>>>>
>>>>> So Slothrop was in London for the first Blitz, usually dated 7 Sep 1940
>>>>> to 11 May 1941, heaviest for the first 2-3 months. That means a minimum of
>>>>> 3 1/2 years -- 4 yrs and 2 months if he witnessed the whole thing, which is
>>>>> closer to the feeling I get here.
>>>>>
>>>>> Keep in mind that the US didn't enter WWII until Dec 1941... Lend-Lease
>>>>> cooperation began after Mar 1941... and even the dodgy swap of US
>>>>> destroyers for rights at UK bases in the Western Hemisphere was Sep 1940.
>>>>>
>>>>> Compare also to "these three years" farther down the page, applied to
>>>>> Slothrop's friendship with Tantivy and the shared office at ACHTUNG. Which
>>>>> would take that back to Nov. 1941, again before US entry into the war and
>>>>> *long* before -- historically -- there was any special focus on "technical
>>>>> intelligence" re "Northern Germany," i.e. V-2s.
>>>>>
>>>>> No note on this discrepancy -- or at least loose end -- at the Pynchon
>>>>> Wiki or in Weisenburger's Companion.
>>>>>
>>>>> So... Does GR explain anywhere what US Army Lt. Slothrop was *doing* in
>>>>> London in 1940-1941? It's not necessarily a ***CLUE*** - even without
>>>>> formal alliance, even in peacetime, likely allies with shared strategic
>>>>> concerns often maintain small military missions in each other's capitals.
>>>>>
>>>>> But given what we'll later learn about plans for Slothrop going way
>>>>> back... maybe we're *supposed* to wonder about it, hmmm?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160406/f7b98510/attachment.html>