Chapter 5 Summary

[Monte Davis]

Weisenburger says that the seance is at "someplace vaguely identified as
'Snoxall’s'" (some sort of club with bar, dining, meeting rooms etc?)

That would put the Roger-Pirate microfilm handoff "transacted in some
distant room" of the same building. I read it that way because on 33 Pirate
thinks of "these bookish sods and rationalized freaks here at Snoxall’s, so
dedicated to Science" and later, in the car (37), Roger says of Pointsman &
co. "They’re as difficult as the lot back in Snoxall’s.” Both  fit the odd
lot present at the seance.

Does the sensitive flame leap high again (31) because the distant V-2 just
heard has ushered a fresh batch of souls from life to death?

Is Jessica's bulls-eye at that moment a commentary on the rocket strike,
and if so what sort of commentary? There's a lot of oscillation between the
rockets as randomly distributed (Mexico, coming up) and as personally
targeted (Pirate on the roof, then Slothrop confiding in Tantivy). That
will be knotted later in the historically accurate anecdote of A4 testing
in Poland, with Peenemunde staff sitting at the aim point because impact
there was not significantly likelier than anywhere else in a circle of many
square km.


On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 1:17 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Here is a summary of key events in the chapter. Disagreements with
> anything?
>
> At the opening of Chapter 5( 30-38) we enter a seance conducted in some
> space of  SOE aka the Firm, a space lit by a sensitive flame in which a
> medium, Carroll Eventyr, seems to have entered the spirit of Roland
> Feldspath expert on control systems, guidance equations (a concept which
> haunts the novel in various forms: rocket
> guidance,determinism/calvinism/fascism/gnosticism ). Roland has "
> transected into the realm of Dominus Blicero”, but Roland gets distracted
> from Blicero by lights moving as in a  dance and  particularly by the  wind
> as a kind of ecstatic force he never knew. He calls out to his wife Selena
> ,who assures she is listening; he starts talking about the difficulty of
> control and  about replacing the invisible hand of the market  with self
> creating control, dispensing with God, then counters that this is only a
> more harmful illusion that A causes B when they are part of same….
> The seance is almost over as the sensitive flame that responds to sound
> and movement retreats then soars up as a new rocket falls  and Jessica
> Swanlake throws dart  which hits dead center .  Selena ,  the dead
> Feldspath’s wife is there. All is recorded by Milton Gloaming trying to
> develop statistical analysis of psychic and other events( death is the most
> frequent word he records). Jessica and Gloaming converse, he asks about
> Roger Mexico, her lover, who she says is with Pirate Prentice.  We move to
> conversation in Snoxall’s (pub,club?) between Prentice and Mexico; Prentice
> is more ambitious and more paranoid than first impression.  Mexico thinks
> the project with psychics is endangered by the revival of witch laws .
> Prentice is delivering microfilm to Mexico from Bloat. We find out about
> PISCES under the larger White Visitation. Pirate is concerned about the
> non-war/post-war related schemes arriving with the  Americans and obscuring
> Germany and war, thinks Mexico is being used in one such indecent plot,
> notes Mexico’s growing enthusiasm for microfilm being sent. Beautiful
> Jessica triggers Prentice's memory of affair with Scorpia Mossmoon, now
> long over. PP longing for real love, friendship, jealous of , but hoping
> Jessica and R M stay together. As chapter fades into maudlin with memory of
> Mossmoon’s inevitable departure Pynchon brings in the merry midgets but it
> falls a bit flat.
>
>
> We think of WW2 as a particularly modern and technological war and that
> gets much attention in GR, but from the start Pynchon is diving into a less
> respectable aspect of the pursuit of information. Psychic or paranormal
> phenomena . Why is it so prominent? We know it played a role in the war,
> but is it standing in for something larger in the Novel? In some ways it
> allows P to introduce nonstandard economic and political information into
> the War history. Is there more?-
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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