BtZ42/10

[Monte Davis]

I take Joseph Tracy's remarks on Orpheus to heart, and read Crutchfield's
(or Weissman's) Southwest (or Sudwest) as a land of the dead, like Jeshimon
in AtD, or Eliot's dry Waste Land.

If so, "one of everything" becomes a negative/opposite of the crowded,
jostling, fecund and prolific living world.

(It might also owe something to an anthropological report in Donald
Barthelme's delicious 1970 short story "Brain Damage": "The Wapituil are
like us to an extraordinary degree... They have a Chock Full o’ Nuts and a
Chevrolet, one of each. They have a Museum of Modern Art and a telephone
and a Martini, one of each. The Martini and the telephone are kept in the
Museum of Modern Art. In fact they have everything that we have, but only
one of each thing... They have one disease, mononucleosis. The sex life of
a Wapituil consists of a single experience, which he thinks about for a
long time.")

And does "the central character" really switch from Slothrop to
Crutchfield... or is Crutchfield that part of Slothrop which has seen all
the Western movies, who has embraced his ancestors' clear-cutting of the
green Berkshires?



On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 7:36 AM, János Széky <miksaapja at gmail.com> wrote:

> 67 (Viking) One of the most mysterious and (for me, at least)
> difficult-to-like passages begins when the central character of the dream
> sequence switches from Slothrop to Crutchfield. (I see him as a pre-image
> of Weismann. Southwest - Südwest.)
>
> So there is "one of each of everything". I can't quite connect this to
> anything that can be conceptualized, and it may be wholly surrealistic,
> but--
>
> as opposed to what we can read in PynchonWiki, imo this is *not *a nod to
> Carl Jung ("not archetypal (...) but the only").
>
> Now there is this song on the next page (the second one):
>
> "Well one little fairy, even one bull dyke,
> One litttle nigger, one little kike, One Red Indian" etc.
>
> This would suggest that with emphasizing "one"-ness, Pynchon targets the
> kind of WASP, male, homophobic way thinking that became the main object of
> social criticism during the next period. That is, thinking in stereotypes
> about everybody else. I don't know when this particular passage was
> written, but seems to reflect the turning point of 1969, augmenting
> Black-related stereotypes with the rest.
>
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