A very different but plausible take on Slothrop and Bianca

[ish mailian]

I'm not sure the use of that phrase about the baby smiling, or a floor wax
or whatever is a good description of how Pynchon's ambiguity works or that
it is very useful when trying to read his prose.

 In this example with Bianca,  we need to deal with much more than a binary
that calls for us to think, both/and rather than either/or.

It's not both/and. That's too easy and subjective. It's not whatever you
want it to be. The text is not a mirror help up to your reading.

As with so many passages in GR, we also have to account for the free
indirect style, that is, the method P uses to narrate from various points
of view, often by shifting diction, words and phrases that readers
recognize as belonging to characters and their attitudes.


This we can do once we get used to it.


But we also have to cope with the fact that once a character-narrator point
of view is assumed by a narrator, often ironically, the point of view may
be bombed out, intoxicated, under extreme pressure, dreaming, mixing, as
Eliot would have it, memory with desire, or shifting into acting or out of
acting or caught between parts or cuts...times are palimpsested over spaces
that are projection of paranoia....

On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 3:59 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> Mapping the "Unmappable": Inhabiting the Fantastic Interface of
> 'Gravity's Rainbow.'
> By Noya, Jose Liste
>
> On Sun, 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
>>
>>
>>
>
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