Whose dream is it?

[John Bailey]

It's worth rereading the New York attack and evacuation in Against the
Day (pp169-173 in the Vintage paperback) alongside the GR opening. P
*must* have had the earlier book in mind there. It's a more masterful
sequence than I remember from my first reading. Also inhabits an
uncertain space reality-wise... could be a dream, a mass fantasy, a
meta-sequence or something else entirely.

On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 4:02 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it is a dream/nightmare of one of the White Visitations patients,
> someone with Real trauma. In other words, it is our nightmare. Pirate's
> later dream is less universal, and not scary at all.
>
> David Morris
>
>
> On Monday, March 14, 2016, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>
>> Crazy thoughts as we start
>>
>> Is Pirate in Slothrop's dream?  Whose dream/nightmare is it?  What is the
>> connection of this dream to time, to Dante’s vision, to the holocaust, to
>> Von Braun quote, to enzian’s rocket lost in time? To Joyc’s circular time?
>>
>> Slothrop - Thomas  Ruggles Pynchon -   Porthos +L  Pynchon likes boys
>> adventure fiction Porthos sounds like pork and port he liked food, wine, he
>> was portly but bold .The added L moves Porthos from the heroic to the lazy,
>> slothful. Protagonist from subject to object.
>>
>> Porthos takes my thoughts to -The man in the Iron Mask- ( no one ever saw
>> his face because it was hidden by a mask of black velvet cloth.)( Wikipedia)
>> Iron appears often in the first pages of Beyond the Zero along with velvet:
>> “Above him lift girders old as an iron queen”  the lost souls in the iron
>> train, “velvet black surfaces contain the movement:” “It is some vast, very
>> old and dark hotel, an iron extension of the track ”“the evacuees are taken
>> in lots, by elevator—a moving wood scaffold open on all sides, hoisted by
>> old tarry ropes and cast-iron pulleys whose spokes are shaped like Ss. ”“His
>> name is Capt. Geoffrey (“Pirate”) Prentice... His skull feels made of
>> metal.”
>>
>> Later in the novels others are contained in steel rockets/bombs as a
>> result of insatiable lust both for revenge and submission.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l