BtZ42, 21: Slothrop backstory in UK

Wed Apr 6 08:18:52 CDT 2016

Great stuff here, Monte, and all. Opens a whole new perspective on Slothrop.

On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 8:11 AM, Ray Easton <raymond.lee.easton at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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?
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>

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