BtZ42: on the road to Greenwich

[Mark Kohut]

Love all this accurate time line---or should that read time of the lines---
shit, since I never figured them out, hats off to Monte again. I knew and
felt FLASHBACKS all over the place in GR but I also want to emphasize here
something I am always noticing: Pynchon working relentlessly
to make us feel NOW and regularly all the way NOW to the very present END
of this book where we are poised NOW.

He ratchets up, uses all his narratorial tricks, sucking us into "the
present" over and over. The present in which most 'normal' novels are set
(or the present of the recent past for most, let's say; or the presentness
of the historic time for historical novels;
which GR IS, basically---until it isn't. Tropistically, it is as if he took
the open-end ending of Lot 49 and decided to poise 'the answer' right over
us in GR, so to speak. Death. IF Lot 49 ends in uncertainty; the certainty
of GR ends openly, so to speak.

Reality is an ontological goal (and necessity?) of good fiction. Right?
Someone said, every movement in Art/Literature is a return to reality. *Savage
Detectives *may be one place this is an overt theme but I have read it as
an aphorism, a remark as well. This isn't the first time I have noted on
the plist the current literarily cultural move to a new "social
realism"---a strain within postmodernism, Lyotard pointed to and predicted
a bit ago. Franzen, Wallace and a moron of novel-writing like Wolfe are
always talking of it. Now Knausgaard, Ferrante do it to lotsa readers. The
rediscovery and huge readership for *Stoner. *

*just sayin'*

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 12:22 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> After the banana breakfast, Pirate sets out for the V-2 impact site on p.
> 11, but won't get there and collect his mail until p. 20. In between, we
> get mostly -- but not entirely -- flashbacks:
>
> (11) Rumanian royalist's fantasy: Wartime London was home to Eastern
> European governments-in-exile from the Baltic states south to the Balkans,
> and it was not clear in late 1944 which might be re-installed after the
> war, or at least used as bargaining chips with the Soviets who were
> overrunning that territory. This seems to be more or less "real time"
>
> (13) memory (date indeterminate) of the tramp, Girl Guides, and "sizzling
> night"
>
> (13-14) memory from 1935 of Loaf's fantasy, the Moslem Messiah -- which
> alerted the Firm to Pirate's talent
>
> (14-16) "At last, one proper Sherlock Holmes London evening" -- date after
> 1935, but indeterminate -- the Adenoid, an outgrowth of Foreign Office
> Balkan specialist Blatherard Osmo. This sequence ends with Osmo's
> mysterious death in 1939, so the "2 1/2 years" Pirate spent in daily visits
> to the Adenoid were within the 1935-1939 span... IF, that is, this
> recollection is of "real time" rather than of Pirate taking part in an
> ongoing Osmotic fantasy, which strikes me as more likely in context.
>
> I doubt it's coincidence that this sequence goes from the Rumanian hint at
> "what will happen after WWII" to the senior diplomats' fears of "Balkan
> Armageddon," i.e. a replay of WWI's origin in Serbia (cf. also Against the
> Day).
>
> So... why an adenoid (i.e. a tonsil), rather than an appendix or spleen or
> hypothalamus? Why human tissue at all, rather than some other stand-in for
> Osmo's fears? Its slimy protoplasmic aspect led me on first reading to
> think of SF movies:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blob
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Master_X-7
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quatermass_II
>
> And its _sshhlop_ing of the troops is parodically close to a scene of the
> Martian death ray in Wells' The War of the Worlds.
>
> All I got -- not much -- is a vague association of the "adenoidal" voice
> with a nasal drawl allegedly common among the UK twits and toffs who might
> have populated the Foreign Office in those days. Still around under new
> management:
>
> http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/that-adenoidal-nasally-geek-voice
>
> And Gogol's Nose:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nose_(Gogol_short_story)
>
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