BtZ42, 21: Slothrop backstory in UK

Wed Apr 6 10:33:41 CDT 2016

The Narrative voice, for lack of a better word,  in GR essentially breaks down, sort of at the same time Slothrop breaks down, and disperses... And Slothrop's time line and his associations break down, as you zoom in .... From a macro-sense we can make out a rough chronology, think Heisenberg... And Wave-Particle duality... We, the reader in the GR, sense force Slothrop to assume his identity throughout the novel, and as the novel continues, especially when we enter the the zone, Slothrop becomes more of a statistical entity.... Instead of assuming that this is a condition that he gradually progressed towards... Maybe it was there from the get-go... Between the 1 & 0 as Roger Mexico would say...

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> On Apr 6, 2016, at 7:14 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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