Section the Third, pg.17-19: Watch the Skies!

[Monte Davis]

"The stars pasted up on Slothrop’s map... a constellation... a cluster... a
violet density... a nebular streaming... this glossy, multicolored, here
and there peeling firmament..."


Slothrop could have used colored pushpins or thumbtacks or dots of ink.
Colored gummed stars might be simply because many US (and other?) kids
encountered them in school, but were they routinely used in marking up maps
in WWII? Would either, or both, account entirely for this concentration of
insistently stellar, astronomical language? is it purely a poetic riff?


The *sky* is certainly with us from the first sentence of GR on, and later
there'll be rockets to a death kingdom on the moon, and Gottfried's final
wishing star... but by and large the stars and significances thereof are,
uhh, thin on the ground in GR -- certainly compared to M&D's omnipresent
"as above, so below."


 As noted before, I still find Duifhuyzen's 1981 "Starry-Eyed Semiotics"
(available in pn006.pdf <http://www.ham.miamioh.edu/krafftjm/pn/pn006.pdf> at
 http://www.ham.miamioh.edu/krafftjm/pn/ ) the best starting place for what
Slothrop's stars mean, don't mean, are mistakenly thought to mean, etc. But
it doesn't really engage with the  stars _qua_ stars.


Still, I'll lean on it, and on "constellations" and "firmament," to advance
the quarter-baked notion that Pynchon is pointing here to astrology as much
as (or more than) astronomy. Constellations are our 2-D *projections*, not
real spatial groupings of stars: of two stars very close on the imagined
shell of the ancient/ medieval firmament, one may be a hundred times as far
away as its apparent neighbor. The same goes in spades for the zodiac,
those "special" constellations that fall on the ecliptic. So there's a
prosaic, "realistic" map of London that corresponds in conventional,
reliable ways to the real London outside... overlaid with a projected
firmament.


So maybe, while the daytime narrative of Bloat's intra-Allied spying (and
hundreds of pages to follow) are telling us that Slothrop's stars are the
key to occult psychic powers, maybe the key to missile defense in the next
War... the stars are whispering that it's all pictures in our heads?
Patterns that aren't really "out there" at all?
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