GR - How old is Bianca? Or: Did Sachsa really die in 1930?

Wed Jan 6 16:13:12 CST 2016

wow...an analysis to go deep into....I will

BUT, I will just say that even the first time I read it, I did think
Slothrop was "only" saying she 'looked' that age.

But I had read Lolita first....and I did not want to believe the 'good guy'
Slothrop was a pedophile.....I did think P wanted to present this sickness
in this way-----males wanted often much younger women.....I could not
buy it as realistic therefore, of course, long before I had heard of
hysterical or magical realism..

but I must reread and think more...

Just sayin'

On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 4:40 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> I've been trying to parse this since that Nabokov discussion couple-three
> weeks ago. I'm using my Penguin 2006 version page numbers, but the
> PynchonWiki uses a different version (Vintage, I think):
>
> During my readings of GR, I've always taken it at face value that Bianca is
> 11 or 12 when Slothrop has sex with her: "He gets a glimpse of Margherita
> and her daughter, but there is a density of orgy-goers around them that
> keeps him at a distance. He knows he's vulnerable, more than he should be,
> to pretty little girls, so he reckons it's just as well, because that
> Bianca's a knockout, all right: 11 or 12, dark and lovely …" [Penguin, p.
> 470-471].
>
>
> But John Krafft makes this argument (see PynchonWiki):
>
> http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Bianca
>
>
> How old IS Bianca?
>
> Slothrop thinks, "Bianca's a knockout, alright: 11 or 12, dark and lovely
> [...]" (p.463), but how old is Bianca, really? Well ...
>
> Bianca is conceived during the filming of Alpdrücken ("I think Bianca is
> [Schlepzig's] child. She was conceived while we were filming this." - p.395)
> Ilse was conceived after Franz Pökler saw Alpdrücken ("he knew that had to
> be the night, Alpdrücken night, that Ilse was conceived." - p.397)
> Leni had already given birth to Ilse when she was seeing Peter Sachsa, e.g.
> "Ilse is awake, and crying. [...] They ought to try Peter after all. He'll
> have milk." (p.163); and Sachsa is killed during a street action in 1930
> ("Taken forcibly over in 1930 by a blow from a police truncheon [...]" -
> p.152)
> Placing Bianca's conception, say, 6 months to a year before Ilse's
> (depending on how long it took for Alpdrücken to reach the theatres and how
> long it took Franz Pökler to go see it), Bianca's birth would have been in
> 1928 or 1929.
> Slothrop meets Bianca aboard the Anubis in 1945.
>
> Thus Bianca must be 16 or 17, yes? (Thanks to John M. Krafft and to Bernard
> Duyfhuizen, of Pynchon Notes, for the above sleuthing.)
>
>
> There's a clear sequence of events: Bianca conceived, then Ilse is
> conceived, then, when Ilse is at least a year or so old, Peter Sachsa dies.
> And, in a book that doesn't have too many direct references to the date (in
> favor of indirect references via historical events like Hirohsima, etc.),
> we're given the date of his death: 1930. Case closed?
>
>
> Here are some of my objections to Krafft's time-line:
>
> 1. Pynchon's intentions with the Slothrop-Bianca sequence: To me, this
> sequence seems very much about Slothrop, pushing 30 [Penguin, p. 471] having
> sex with a very underage girl. She looks to him as if she's 11 or 12. Does
> Pynchon expect the reader to parse through the book, come up with the
> above-mentioned time line and think, "Ah, silly Slothrop, you're not the
> creep you think you are for lusting after such a little girl. She's actually
> 16 or 17."?  If Bianca is 16 or 17, the ( or "a" ) subtext of the scene
> would be Slothrop thinking he's having sex with a much-younger girl, or
> Slothrop and Bianca role-playing that she's a much-younger girl. This isn't
> impossible. Earlier, at the beginning of the orgy sequence,  Margherita and
> Bianca are role-playing that she's a Shirley Temple-aged tot who deserves a
> good spanking.
>
> But it just seems unlikely to me that Pynchon would expect the reader to
> read the text this way - certainly not at first reading, anyway. So he must
> have, at minimum, been aware that readers would take the 11 or 12 age as a
> given. Other evidence: Stefania, described as "maybe 18" says: "While they
> were away, they left Bianca with us, at Bydgoszcz. She has her bitchy
> moments, but she's really a charming child." [Penguin, p. 469]. Doesn't
> sound like she's discussing a girl near her own age.
>
> In the next section, when the sex scene occurs, Slothrop is dreaming of the
> White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. A possible reference to Lewis
> Carroll's alleged infatuation with Alice Liddell? Carroll broke abruptly
> with the Liddell family when Alice was 11. And, of course, there's that
> possible connection to 12-year-old Lolita.
>
> On p. 477, Bianca's breasts are described as "pre-subdeb." The Sub-debs were
> some sort of sorority for high-school girls back in the day.
>
> Also: OK, a whole stream of thought: Margherita the child-murderer whom
> Bianca must be protected from; Imipolex and Margherita, Imipolex and
> Weissmann, Imipolex and Slothrop, Imipolex and Gottfried; Pokler, never sure
> of his daughter Ilse, but fantasizing about sex with her; Bianca and Ilse,
> their conceptions linked; Gottfried in the rocket, Slothrop inside his own
> cock while having sex with Bianca ...
>
> So many chemical-rocket-abused kids connections. There are I simply can't
> believe that Pynchon expects us to think that Bianca is really 16 or 17.
>
> 2. But damned, there is that 1930 date! Another time discrepancy:
>
> Franz Pokler meets Mondaugen (Penguin, p. 164) right after observing a
> failed rocket test. This sequence starts two pages earlier. Leni is pregnant
> with Ilse. Franz is earning a living doing odd jobs, and on this day he's
> been pasting movie posters on walls (for a Max Schlepzig film). On the next
> page, he's wandered into the Reinickendorf neighborhood, where he then
> observes a failed rocket test, after which he looks up and sees Mondaugen
> (whom he went to technical college - Technische Hochschule - with 7 or 8
> years earlier).
>
>
>
> Here's the description of the static rocket test: "But the light grew
> brighter, and the watching figures suddenly started dropping for cover as
> the rocket now gave a sputtering roar, a long burst, voices screaming get
> down and he hit the dirt just as the silver thing blew apart …"
>
>
>
> This had to be based on this incident, the static test of a Mirak rocket at
> the Reinickendorf facility in May, 1931:
>
>
>
> "In May 1931 Riedel improvised a rocket, using the thrust chamber developed
> for the Mirak, fed by two long tanks containing liquid oxygen and gasoline,
> which would form guiding sticks for the forward-mounted engine. The
> lashed-together rocket rises to 20 m on its first 'static' test. On 14 May a
> flight-weight version of Riedel's 'flying test stand' takes off into a
> looping trajectory, sending the VfR experimenters running for cover, but
> reaching 60 m altitude in the process."
>
>
>
> http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/mirak.htm
>
>
>
> By this reckoning, Ilse is born in 1931, after Sachsa's death. This birth
> date, assuming she was conceived months (at minimum) after Bianca, still
> makes Bianca about 14 years old at the time Slothrop has sex with her. So is
> Sachsa alive or dead when Ilse is born? Is Pynchon positing a fictional
> rocket test that took place in 1929 or so? Possibly. But Pynchon really did
> his homework on the history of the German rocket program (before and after
> the Nazis took over). Would he really torture his carefully-researched facts
> just to fit them to Sachsa's 1930 death? There's absolutely no significant
> reason that I can find that Sachsa needs to have died in 1930. Could Pynchon
> have made a careless mistake? Or maybe Sachsa didn't actually die in 1930?
> He's introduced as a ghost-medium during the 1945 seance [Penguin, p. 154],
> and is described as having been "forcibly taken over in 1930 by a blow from
> a police truncheon." Could "taken over" mean that he gained his insights
> into the "other side."? He was leading seances when Leni and baby Ilse
> visited him. It's pretty hard to read anything other than death in the words
> "taken over," given the context. Again, could Pynchon have been careless
> with the choice of 1930? Hard to know what to think here.
>
>
> 3. Other stray points: Pokler never sure if the girl he's with is Ilse.
> Could Margherita be abducting, procuring various incarnations of Bianca?
> We're told that Bianca was conceived during the filming of Alpdrucken. Was
> this some sort of mental conception in Margherita's head - the "idea" of
> Bianca was born, and she went on to procure Biancas? Grasping at straws
> here. Stefania doesn't believe Bianca even has a father. "I doubt she had a
> father. It was parthenogenesis, she's pure Margherita, if pure is the word I
> want." [ Penguin, p. 469]
>
>
> Is Pynchon just playing around with Time? I'd believe it if this were ATD.
> But the space-time continuum isn't in play in GR, which is very much about
> Newtonian physics, or, at least, standard engineering formulae. Correct me
> if there's evidence to the contrary.
>
>
> Laura
>
> (pardon my laziness in adding the required umlauts)
>
>
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