BtZ42: The Hunt with very brief chapter summary

[Mark Kohut]

What a comic, Marx Brothers' scene when visualized! Surface Hilarious. 

Pointsman caught in the Shit, Money & the Word web of meanings. 

Pynchon puts us inside dogs' minds! Already Showing their conditioned responses to life experiences, dangerous ones. In some way showing conditioned responses are true---but in a whole life, not experiment-reduced way? Irony. 

Some poor knight-like creature with no real King, no Fisher King, no Arthur and another riff on 
A world without a God tower, " confusions toward an apical God, a derangement of aim" this " ruined" improvised Gothic world 

And Pointsman, catching a whiff of his own ether, nice metaphor for the contamination of the
Experimenter and the subject. 

And, Jessica thinks of Cuddling with her husband which Roger exclaims at---and, yes Ish, a compressed version of Love in the Western World ( and knights in love with their queens) as
A husband is safe comfort while the lover is adulterous passion. 


Sent from my iPad

> On Apr 27, 2016, at 9:49 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> 
> Monte, good points, man. 
> 
> chapter summary:
> enter scene in mind of dog being hunted by Pointsman in rubble near latest bomb site  RM and JS drive up,  they get net & stuff out of trunk to catch dog, Jessica sympathizing with animal. Pointsman gets toilet bowl caught on his leg, and looks in his balaclava and clanking movement like a knight to JS. She wonders who he is fighting for what king( reminiscent of TH White’s hilarious fight with knights? Mex goes toward dog with ether which may be affecting him because the dog speaks making joke,” You were expecting maybe Lassie?"  lots of fun but dog escapes.  Pointsman says maybe its a sign( funny phrase for a Pavlolian), but turns into first hint that Pointsman wants humans to experiment with, maybe M.  They go to hospital(St. V of the True Image) of Dr K Spectro one of 7 owners of The Book? JS and RM Drop off P and drive away.
> ******
> Comments: We step from waste and entropy directly into the toilet bowl theme, which, also notwithstanding the comic effects, is a major theme of Pynchon, from rats and alligators in the NY sewers to Slothrop’s legendary plunge.  In some ways this scene with Pointsman seems like a comic refutation of the Pavlovian/Skinnerian enterprise of demonstrating predictability. It also shows the will and determination that are summoned to refute the concepts of will and choice. Pointsman wants to parse the subconscious as a series of predictable choices, but Pynchon sees the subconscious in murkier metaphors.
> 
>> On Apr 27, 2016, at 3:58 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 42: "quarry"... "pack of children"... "sanctuary"
>> 43: "nest"... "net"..."gillie"
>> 44: "escape"... "this isn't Kenya"
>> 45: "getting away"... "closing in"... "bolt"
>> 46: "a fine specimen"..."to fright, to simple escape"
>> 
>> All the slapstick notwithstanding, this is a hunt. The next section will end (52) with Pointsman's insistent demand for "one of your fine Foxes. *Damn it.* One, little, *Fox*!”
>> 
>> Traditional English fox hunting doesn't appear explicitly in GR, but there's Odin/Wuotan's "wild hunt", Frans Van der Groov's dodo hunt, and of course Their hunt for Slothrop (Pointsman's ultimate Fox) as he hunts for a special rocket -- because foxes (like feral dogs) are themselves stalkers and predators, too. All this alongside the book's multiple and more often discussed "quests," which overlap but aren't quite the same thing.
>> 
>> If GR is about people caught up in the great inescapable doom-y System... what do we make of this first, most extended and insistent hunt being a comedy -- and a failure? 
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