BtZ42 pages 116-121 The Fire of Paradise

[Mark Kohut]

joseph writes: I see the candies as the terrible and weirdly hilarious
difference between the thing being advertised and the thing as experienced,
tasted, consumed. The essence of a great deal of satire.

the candies as advertised sorta like most political and social betterment
talk vs. the realities. Lotsa bitter.

On Sun, Jul 3, 2016 at 10:39 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I see the candies as the terrible and weirdly hilarious difference between
> the thing being advertised and the thing as experienced, tasted, consumed.
> The essence of a great deal of satire.
> The Fire of Paradise is the most loaded with contradictory mythic imagery,
> and inasmuch as this section can be read as a bawdy fairy tale, the final
> test before the pleasures of Darlene.
>
> To get a bit weird  and risk stretching the metaphor, there seems to be
> several references in describing the candies to a combination of exoticism
> and the chemistry of war.  To me this suggests British colonialism: exotic
> consumption fueled by the technology of war. Do human appetites get weirdly
> nasty when their satisfaction is tied to, say, cruelty, theft, destruction.
> Maybe the hand of the King in Mrs’ Quoad’s dream is meant to be ambivalent
> in a similar way.
>
> > On Jul 1, 2016, at 7:31 AM, Eileen Pierce <eileenpierce333 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Please help me understand more about The Fire of Paradise and where a
> person might find it.
> >
> > “resembling the descriptions of poison and debilitating gases found in
> training manuals”
> >
> > “Inner rooms and older faces developing under light falling through a
> skylight, yellower, later in the year . . . . ‘  (and why four ellipses
> here, not three?)
> >
> > Thank you so much, I so enjoy reading your posts.  You make reading GR
> even more fun!
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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