I really shouldn't be so hard on myself for not truly understanding large aspects of this book. I'm only on my second reading of the book which is, ultimately, the true first reading. It's the first time you can actually follow the relationships between characters, or see the importance of certain experiences each has during their journey. But more than that, it's important to come to a work of literature first through your own eyes and your own experiences. One of the themes Pynchon comes back to often is how everybody experiences something differently based on their motivations, education, past trials and travails, and their general emotional demeanor. We're all going to first get something different from the book than everybody else. Different parts of the text will stand out due to our own personal philosophies, hobbyhorses, and crotchets. Some people will want to go beyond that and try to ferret out what the author meant, specifically, with his choices and characters and metaphors based on Hansel and Gretel. What was happening during the time Pynchon was writing the novel that he might have been commenting on? What historical moments did he work with, and why, and how did he fictionalize them to express whatever it was he was trying to express? This won't lead anybody to one secret text which exposes the entire novel, flayed open and dissected for goggle-eyed students in lab coats to gawk at as they take notes on cradled clipboards. The texts will be varied, concentrating on different themes and ideas. Just as everybody approaches the novel from a different angle based on who they are.
What I'm saying is I'd like to establish my own relationship with the novel before I read any academic studies of it (which I almost certainly will). That's what this blog (and my Against the Day blog are meant to do. They aren't great insightful documents for other people. They're just my thoughts codified and left out for anybody to read. Enjoy them or not. But don't expect me to explicate every last bit of a book I'm only really just getting to know.
This probably would have been a good way to start my discussions on Chapter Two! But I was just thinking about it after the last section of the book which blew my mind wide open. So it goes here a bit early, two sections before starting Chapter Two. What can I do? (Aside from copy and pasting it and saving it for Part XXII (which I totally don't want to do))
This section finds Pointsman alone over Christmas but excited about his experiment with Slothrop. He's so excited that he keeps getting boners thinking about it! So is Slothrop's boner the stimulus now for Pointsman's boner? That's gay, right? Anyway, it allows Pointsman to start making puns which leads him to state this joke from the mainstream (so not smart and probably not funny because it's told by non-academic dolts): "What did the Cockney exclaim to the cowboy from San Antonio?" He doesn't give us the punchline but my guess is that it's either simply "'owdy pardner!" with a Cockney accent or whatever the rhyming slang for "Howdy partner" is. Eva Gardner, maybe? No wait. I get it. He gives the stupid answer before asking the riddle since he's spending time punning on the word "cortex" and how it can be translated to "bark" from Latin to English. So that's it. It's just "Cor, tex" (as in "Cor blimey! Me tea jus' up an kippered me pants at the car boot sale, ya berk!"). It's basically more of the Kenosha Kid way of reading things.
Maud Chilkes, a woman Pointsman has mentioned previously in his inability to flirt with her, blows him at The White Visitation Christmas party. I only mention this because it's hot and also because of this line in a paragraph that follows: "Maude knows something's up all right, the finances of PISCES pass through her hands, nothing escapes her." Hee hee. Right-o! Cor blimey!
We learn Gwenhidwy is still alive and get a bit of an update on how he's doing. Mostly it's singing and drinking. I love this bit: "He is descended directly from the Welshman in Henry V who ran around forcing people to eat his Leek." Plus he has a theory that the Big Bang was a masturbatory experience. I'm totally on board with that since it's how I described the creation of the universe in the DC Mythos based on Krona's observations of The Big Bang (see whatever comic book blog post in which I discussed this. Don't worry. There are only like 4500 of them. You'll find it in no time).
Gwenhidwy, who spends his time treating those the rockets have injured or displaced, has a paranoid theory about the city and how it grows like a living organism that has somehow chosen for the poorest, most abused of society, to be the expendable front in its defenses. The minorities and the poor have all been shunted to the east and south sides of the city because those were the places the City most feared danger or attack. From the sea or across the continent, from some Other place that is not England. That's where the east and south of London face and so that's where the City has chosen to place those it deems most expendable.
Gwenhidwy has another theory about the babies being born over the last year and how they fall, like the rockets, in a Poisson distribution. Is he suggesting they're Slothrop's kids? Probably not, right? But, I mean, why bring it up? Is it just Gwenhidwy's optimism, to point out that the constant state of universal randomness that can be measured by Mexico's statistics not only works for death but life as well?
The section ends with an allegory of bugs chewing away at the hay in Jesus' manger. Just getting on, their actions sometimes causing the other bugs to stumble and fall, with Jesus' cries off in the distance, sometimes heard and acknowledged as existing but of no real consequence to the lives below, chewing hay and getting on with it.
What I'm saying is I'd like to establish my own relationship with the novel before I read any academic studies of it (which I almost certainly will). That's what this blog (and my Against the Day blog are meant to do. They aren't great insightful documents for other people. They're just my thoughts codified and left out for anybody to read. Enjoy them or not. But don't expect me to explicate every last bit of a book I'm only really just getting to know.
This probably would have been a good way to start my discussions on Chapter Two! But I was just thinking about it after the last section of the book which blew my mind wide open. So it goes here a bit early, two sections before starting Chapter Two. What can I do? (Aside from copy and pasting it and saving it for Part XXII (which I totally don't want to do))
This section finds Pointsman alone over Christmas but excited about his experiment with Slothrop. He's so excited that he keeps getting boners thinking about it! So is Slothrop's boner the stimulus now for Pointsman's boner? That's gay, right? Anyway, it allows Pointsman to start making puns which leads him to state this joke from the mainstream (so not smart and probably not funny because it's told by non-academic dolts): "What did the Cockney exclaim to the cowboy from San Antonio?" He doesn't give us the punchline but my guess is that it's either simply "'owdy pardner!" with a Cockney accent or whatever the rhyming slang for "Howdy partner" is. Eva Gardner, maybe? No wait. I get it. He gives the stupid answer before asking the riddle since he's spending time punning on the word "cortex" and how it can be translated to "bark" from Latin to English. So that's it. It's just "Cor, tex" (as in "Cor blimey! Me tea jus' up an kippered me pants at the car boot sale, ya berk!"). It's basically more of the Kenosha Kid way of reading things.
Maud Chilkes, a woman Pointsman has mentioned previously in his inability to flirt with her, blows him at The White Visitation Christmas party. I only mention this because it's hot and also because of this line in a paragraph that follows: "Maude knows something's up all right, the finances of PISCES pass through her hands, nothing escapes her." Hee hee. Right-o! Cor blimey!
We learn Gwenhidwy is still alive and get a bit of an update on how he's doing. Mostly it's singing and drinking. I love this bit: "He is descended directly from the Welshman in Henry V who ran around forcing people to eat his Leek." Plus he has a theory that the Big Bang was a masturbatory experience. I'm totally on board with that since it's how I described the creation of the universe in the DC Mythos based on Krona's observations of The Big Bang (see whatever comic book blog post in which I discussed this. Don't worry. There are only like 4500 of them. You'll find it in no time).
Gwenhidwy, who spends his time treating those the rockets have injured or displaced, has a paranoid theory about the city and how it grows like a living organism that has somehow chosen for the poorest, most abused of society, to be the expendable front in its defenses. The minorities and the poor have all been shunted to the east and south sides of the city because those were the places the City most feared danger or attack. From the sea or across the continent, from some Other place that is not England. That's where the east and south of London face and so that's where the City has chosen to place those it deems most expendable.
Gwenhidwy has another theory about the babies being born over the last year and how they fall, like the rockets, in a Poisson distribution. Is he suggesting they're Slothrop's kids? Probably not, right? But, I mean, why bring it up? Is it just Gwenhidwy's optimism, to point out that the constant state of universal randomness that can be measured by Mexico's statistics not only works for death but life as well?
The section ends with an allegory of bugs chewing away at the hay in Jesus' manger. Just getting on, their actions sometimes causing the other bugs to stumble and fall, with Jesus' cries off in the distance, sometimes heard and acknowledged as existing but of no real consequence to the lives below, chewing hay and getting on with it.
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