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

Wed Jan 6 16:29:18 CST 2016

Isn't the point, though, that he thinks she's 11 or 12?

Www.innergroovemusic.com

> On Jan 6, 2016, at 5:13 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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)
>> 
>> 
>> - Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l