BtZ42/10

[Mark Kohut]

love the possible Barthelme conceptual influence. agreed re 'this jostling
world; in the post I just sent (written before).

On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 9:49 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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