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

[matthew cissell]

Laura and Listers,

First, I find Dr. Kraffts reading to be rather convincing. Second, Pynchon
once asked why reading should be easy; so yes, he expects us to do some
serious work.

Most importantly I think that if our reading is dehistoricized and
decontextualized we are bound to run down blind alleys.

The question here is if there is something repugnant or perverse in the
scene with Bianca; does it suggest, or worse promote, pedophilia? I think
we woud do best to consider the depiction of desire and/or sexual practice
in novels by reviewing the history of that writing.

Perhaps Rabelais is not offensive, but what about Sade? Before we consider
Death in Venice, or Nausea, or works by Burroughs or whoever we must study
the history of writing about this material. A touch of the sordid or risqué
(perhaps even the perverse or deviant) has become a mark of Literature.

Perhaps now we can switch from literature to music as they are both fields
of cultural production. Are you familar with the song "Birthday" by the
Sugarcubes? It could be disturbing to some I suppose, but it was not
written or sung by a man. Bjórk explained it in her own way but I don't
think we can call it Femsplaining.

Of course this is my own approach and I wouldn't want to be accused of
telling anyone how to read or what to understand in a text. In this
situation it might be better to listen to soomeone talking about how they
read the section and what they feel. For example, the library scene in
Nausea could be very disturbing for someone who has suffered sexual abuse,
and rather than providing a different reading I would do better to
understand their own response.

And for folks who don't want to read depictions of misogyny and what not
there is always Nicholas Sparks. What a good, wholesome, fine young man. Of
course it might be interesting to read his books as examples of symbolic
violence that don't involve physical or sexual violence. Von Triers
"Anti-christ" as opposed to "The Notebook".

ciao
mc otis




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69R_Uf57R0U



On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 10:40 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
> <http://www.ham.muohio.edu/~krafftjm/pynchon.html>, 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
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