BtZ42/10 Jack violating gravity

[ish mailian]

Coool beans!

On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 10:31 AM, János Széky <miksaapja at gmail.com> wrote:
> 65 (Viking)
>
> "If anybody could've save the harp, betcha Jack could (...) might Jack have
> kept it from falling , violated gravity somehow?"
>
> One of the secret topical games in GR, left there to discover:
>
> Slothrop loses his "silver harp" here (and descends to the underworld like
> Orpheus; one of P's tacit, non-naming cultural-historical allusions).
>
> Jack Kennedy, one of the very few faultlessly Good Guys in the novel
> (belonging to the Catholic/Mediterranean side by the way) might have kept it
> from falling, violating gravity (the central concept).
>
> He finds the harp in Part Four, Section 1 (622V), and here Pynchon comes a
> step closer to naming, quoting from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus ("And though
> Earthliness forget you").
>
> And near the very end the harp reemerges again, now complete with the name,
> in the subchapter Orpheus Pits Down His Harp (754V). And here the
> protagonist is Nixon, Kennedy's antithesis, the Absolute Bad Guy at the time
> of writing. Gravity prevails, the Rocket falls.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l