A very different but plausible take on Slothrop and Bianca

[Mark Kohut]

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On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 3:36 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> IIRC, I didn't twig until Bernard Duyfhuizen's  "Starry-Eyed Semiotics:
> Learning to Read Slothrop's Map and Gravity's Rainbow" in Pynchon Notes:
>
>
>
> Much of the critical writing devoted to Gravity's Rainbow portrays the
> relationship between Tyrone Slothrop and his star-studded map of London as
> follows: "Tyrone's London map, recording in varicolored stars the sites of
> his affairs, starts one of the major threads of the novel"; "On a map of
> London Slothrop has placed stars to designate the inordinate number of his
> sexual conquests [...]; they correspond exactly with the impact points of
> the V-2's"... etc. etc.
>
>
> ...Recently, Brian McHale revealed  ["Modernist Reading, Post-Modern Text:
> The Case of Gravity's Rainbow," Poetics Today, 1, No. 1-2 (1979), 94] the
> probable unreli­ability of Slothrop's map:
>
>
>
> Slothrop's sexual conquests in London are crucial to the plot of Gravity's
> Rainbow, since they provide the first evidence of that affinity for the V-2
> blitz which will determine Slothrop's subsequent career in the novel. So it
> is with some dismay that we later learn from Slothrop himself that at least
> some of these conquests were simply erotic fantasies, not real girls.[i]
>
>
>
> The passage McHale refers to is on page 302 of Gravi­ty’s Rainbow[ii], where
> Slothrop recalls the "gentlemanly reflex that made him edit, switch names,
> insert fan­tasies into the yarns he spun for Tantivy back in the ACHTUNG
> office." We will have more to say about this passage presently, but for now,
> McHale's statement, and Pynchon's via Slothrop, necessitate that we re­think
> our readings of Slothrop's map, and re-approach the novel with an
> understanding that one of the "major [yarns] of the novel" is more tangled
> and knotted than we had previously thought.
>
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 3:07 PM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> So it's possibly a map of sexual fantasies?
>>
>> Www.innergroovemusic.com
>>
>> On Jan 10, 2016, at 3:00 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Also, or course, intrepid detectives Perdoo and Speed discover that some
>> (most? all?) of the stars on Slothrop's map -- ostensibly recording his
>> sexual encounters, and therefore the crucial link in the precognitive-penis
>> connection to A4 impacts -- do not correspond to real women, e.g. the
>> ever-so-sweet Darlene Quoad.
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 2:49 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Tore Rye Andersen sent me his interpretation of the sequence off-list and
>>> gave the OK to post it. I find his arguments very persuasive:
>>>
>>> Have you considered that the whole scene with Bianca may be simply a
>>> dream/fantasy by Slothrop? I believe there is some textual evidence to
>>> support this theory: 1) Slothrop is prone to vivid fantasies about girls,
>>> and these fantasies are often presented as 'real' - that is, the narrator
>>> doesn't explicitly point out their status as fantasy (see e.g. the orgy
>>> under Nordhausen on the top of p. 304). Might the scene with Bianca be yet
>>> another fantasy, just more elaborate than the others? The latter part of the
>>> scene certainly slides into fantasy, when Slothrop is inside his own cock -
>>> which is also somehow the rocket. 2) Or might it all be a dream? The chapter
>>> starts with Slothrop waking from a dream about Llandudno. Then he wakes,
>>> more or less, and in the corner of his vision "he catches a flutter of red"
>>> - note the uncertainty here. And then, crucially, after exchanging a few
>>> comments with her (if it is really her), we get this: "Hmm. Maybe he'll go
>>> back to sleep, here" (468) - and then the sex scene unfolds. I think an
>>> argument can be made that he does indeed go back to sleep. At least, the
>>> possibility remains open, which does give the remaining scene a somewhat
>>> ambiguous status. Maybe it happened, maybe Slothrop dreamt/fantasized it
>>> (which doesn't let him off the moral hook, of course). On p. 492-493 Bianca
>>> once again 'visits' Slothrop as he sleeps, and once again it is not
>>> specifically pointed out as a dream.
>>>
>>> A few additional observations: Shirley Temple is mentioned during the
>>> imaginary orgy on p. 304. The next time she's mentioned is when Bianca
>>> imitates Shirley Temple on p. 466, and then she's mentioned again on p. 493,
>>> when Bianca 'visits' Slothrop in a dream (and his own voice suddenly sounds
>>> just like Shirley Temple's). So there seems to be a pattern involving
>>> Shirley Temple/fantasy/imaginary orgy/Bianca.
>>>
>>> Just to play the Devil's advocate with regard to my own theory, there's a
>>> small detail on p. 481 that would seem to indicate that Slothrop did have
>>> sex with Bianca: he apparently finds her frock "with a damp trace of his own
>>> semen still at the hem" - but then again: is it really her dress, and can
>>> Slothrop really recognize his own semen? And what's more, the other semen
>>> stain Slothrop encounters in the novel (on p. 297, under Nordhausen) is
>>> fake, planted there for the tourists.
>>>
>>> At any rate, I believe that the sex scene with Bianca confirms Tony
>>> Tanner's point that readers of GR are never entirely sure whether they are
>>> in a bombed-out building or a bombed-out mind. Is the baby smiling, or is it
>>> just gas? Which do you want it to be?
>>>
>>>
>>> [ and another bit of evidence for Tore's theory - the sequence (Penguin,
>>> p. 427-8) where Pokler has a sudden fantasy about having sex with his young
>>> daughter. This goes on for a long paragraph, but concludes with: "No. What
>>> Pokler did was choose to believe … " etc.]
>>>
>>> Laura
>>>
>>> - Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l