BtZ42 Section 9 (pp 53-60): Jessica wakes

[Keith Davis]

nice...

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> On May 10, 2016, at 4:14 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hell, it's a recurring trope at least since H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, which quite consciously asked the imperial UK "What if London were attacked by a force as superior to us as our forces are to the Mahdi's Fuzzy-Wuzzies in the Sudan?" (and remember that comb in V.!) And what happens if you bring Kong back from that tropical island as an entertaining souvenir, and then he breaks his chains?
> 
> If you're a world-bestriding empire in the daytime, don't be surprised if your dreams start ringing changes on the Fall of the Towers.   
> 
>> On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 3:25 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>> I like the link you've made between Jessica's dream and Pointsman's child-abducting fantasies. Her dream also reminded me of another scene that couldn't have possibly been a gleam in Pynchon's eye at the time he wrote this: the scene in ATD of a marauding monster from the North laying waste to a city - which seemed directly inspired by 9-11. But maybe it hearkens back to this in some way, as a recurring Pynchon trope?
>> 
>> Laura
>> 
>> -----Original Message----- 
>> From: Monte Davis 
>> Sent: May 10, 2016 10:58 AM 
>> To: “pynchon-l at waste.org“ 
>> Subject: BtZ42 Section 9 (pp 53-60): Jessica wakes 
>> 
>> This section (early December 20, the longest night of the year) begins and ends with V-2 explosions: one that brings Jessica awake, "up to watch herself watching the night" as Roger sleeps in their evacuation-zone hideaway, and one remembered from some earlier time together in the same place. There are interpolated scenes of Roger at The White Visitation, talking with Pointsman and with Rev. Paul de la Nuit ("of the Night," heh). These cannot be known to Jessica, but mesh with her own memories of conversation(s) with Roger about the statistics of V-2 strikes.
>> 
>> Page 53: The opening paragraphs echo the beginning of GR: an urban nightmare (see London among others in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Smoke), waking, a cigarette and a survey of the scene outside. This time, instead of the impersonal fated Evacuation, the nightmare is an implied King-Kongish monster (J's "Fay Wray look" coming up on p. 57) gathering up girls who are also dolls, their open-and-shut counterweighted eyes becoming Jessica's own as the blast jolts her awake. Pointsman's midnight stalking and predatory tenderness toward children are in the nightmare mix too, of course -- again, not known to daylight Jessica but sensed through the creepiness she glimpses in person and hears about via Roger. 
>> 
>> http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03167/kingkong_3167370b.jpg
>> 
>> The dolls, Jessica's "blind little hand," her stuffed panda, cast her as childlike -- but very soon she is mother too, smoking as she tidies up Roger's strewn clothes. This switching of relational ages runs through everything we see of them together (e.g. how she she sees him in the passage beginning "Roger really wants other people to know what he's talking about" at 56.37).
>> 
>> "...blackout was lifted weeks and weeks ago... being frisked for cameras and binoculars" The last significant German bombing effort in the UK had been the "Baby Blitz" (Operation Steinbock) of Jan-May 1944, but as the name suggests, that -- and most Luftwaffe bombing since summer 1941 -- had been small and ineffectual compared to the original Blitz. Still, blackout orders remained in effect for some months, not that the V-weapons cared about telltale lights from the ground. And even with Allied armies in France since early June 1944, precautions against spies continued on transport routes between London and the crucial Channel ports.
> 
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