BtZ42 Section 9 (pp 53-60): at the window while he sleeps

[Monte Davis]

(That should be "chep nihilism" in the penultimate paragraph)

On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 11:50 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> end of P. 57 -> P. 58
>
> Foxes and dogs again, among the latter a painted pointer "alerted by the
> eternal scent, the explosion over his head always just about to come." Good
> boy, Tyrone!
>
> http://www.old-print.com/mas_assets/full3/J5141807/J5141807448.jpg
>
> https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/43/02/f0/4302f06cbc44b3b2e6fbc371f51b2bce.jpg
>
>
> What makes these images -- standard English fare at the time  for exurban
> bourgeois as well as country-house aristocracy -- "even more autumnal,
> necropolitical, than prewar hopes"..? This section has reminded us before
> and will remind us again that Roger & Jessica's evasion  of the war is
> temporary and precarious -- but here we're told that golden autumnal
> meadows are *becoming* a City of the Dead (necropolis). Just a _memento
> mori_ for the lovers, for a nostalgic English self-image? More?
>
> 58.11-15: something blocks Roger's speech, and "how does she know... so
> exactly what Roger meant to say?" (Reinforcing 56.37's "Roger really wants
> other people to know what he’s talking about. Jessica understands that.") A
> hug, melting into arousal for both, is more than a consolation prize for
> "failure to communicate" -- it *is* communication, "mind-to-mind."
>
> 58.16 brings us back to the framing night of winter solstice. Perhaps the
> clinch just above was earlier the same night -- the section began with "pillows
> in front of the fire. Roger’s clothing... scattered all about." Or perhaps
> all their nights here are one, off the timeline and off the books.
>
> 58.24: "Pointsman’s... his... a bleakness whenever she meets him.
> Scientist-neutrality." How does that differ from Roger's commitment to the
> data and only the data about rocketfalls, which was only recently "cheap
> cynicism"...? Or is Roger's version of neutrality less creepy to her
> *because* it makes him uncomfortable even as he insists on it? NB he
> repeatedly, parodically *plays* the mad scientist in exchanges with her. If
> I didn't know that Pynchon fears and condemns science like all good
> creative souls, I'd think there's some quite interesting ambivalence being
> modeled here.
>
> 58.33: "And the people who might have been asleep in the empty houses
> here . .., are they dreaming of cities that shine all over with lamps at
> night, of Christmases seen again from the vantage of children and not of
> sheep huddled so vulnerable on their bare hillside, so bleached by the
> Star’s awful radiance?"
> Spoilers be damned, this is a sweet foretaste of the Advent evensong
> coming up three nights from now (p. 127)
>
>
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