So the last section in Part 1, from pg 177 to pg 180, describes a Christmas scene with Roger and Jessica and the memory of the pantomime Roger takes the children to, Hansel and Gretel of course.
I thought this section would be particularly good for some closer reading, considering its literal position in the novel, and how it does seem to encompass or at least subsume some of the themes and images that have been floating around "Beyond the Zero," in a refreshingly un-scientific voice, which is I guess the voice of Roger when he's with the Jessica (as opposed to the voice of Roger-with-Pointsman).
First off there's the surface-level connection to Katje-Gottfried-Blicero, by just the sheer fact that the oven scene in Hansel and Gretel is being performed for them (aided by the knowledge that Hansel is being played by a lanky girl) which might possibly be some kind of play on the phrase "theater of war" but is more likely significant because of the way Roger and Jessica, the love that is desperate to survive the war, or at least survive "within" the war, are watching this scene. Some of the secondary reading I've done [David Seed, I think specifically] has been suggesting that Hansel and Gretel might be representative of the German Romantics turn to a "national folk-consciousness" that had the capacity to empower (i.e., Nazism), but that the collectiveness of this dream found its power in the way it destroyed individual identities -- I understand this as being: Weissman is a marginal figure in the scheme of the war/world, but is raised to a level of extreme power and significant in the way he sacrifices his own identity and assumes a folk archetype ("Blicero," the Witch).
During the pantomime, "Gretel, who was just winding up with her broom to hit the Witch right in the bum, stopped..." when the rocket falls nearby. This seems to say to me that these folk-identities, whose proliferation and celebration are perhaps causes of this kind of War-with-a-capital-W, are kind of stopped short by the faceless death of the rocket (which reminds me of Slothrop's fantasy about a "rocket with his name on it"...it's paranoid, but it's also a bit of a fantasy that the rockets could have singular identities...a more "human" death?). I think what's important here is that there is a confusion of identities: there have been those who come to terms with their own smallness by assuming the mythic identities of folk hero/villains, there have been those who do it by attempting to connect with someone else (Rog and Jess's love), both sides complicated by the fact that these tactics are flawed -- the folk heroes will start to recognize that role as individual, and the individuals cannot help feeling caught up in something beyond themselves. Thus the terror of the rocket, its randomness, etc.
Then Gretel sings that scary song to calm the children. She sings, "We can fly to the moon, we'll be higher than noon / In our polythene home in the sky," which seems to foreshadow Gottfried's (Gretel's!) eventual home inside the Imipolex G compartment of the 00000. But this is complicated by the line two verses later that states, "Turn your pockets and get-your surpri-ise / There was nobody there after all!" Then she ends with "And those voices you hear, Boy and Girl of the Year / Are of children who are learning to die." To be honest, I'm having trouble breaching the literal, kind of punch-line aspect to the first couplet, my only theory being that maybe Pynchon says "no one was there after all" because Gottfried has surrendered his individual identity to the folk identity of Gretel?
The last line I want to think about is this:
"If she leaves, then it ceases to matter how the rockets fall."
Roger think-narrates this while he contemplates Jessica's transience. He later remembers her lieutenant boyfriend, and remarks of him "Damned Beaver/Jeremy is the War." These seem related. The statement would be, from any none-Pynchon character, simply fatalistic: "If I don't have her, then who cares, let one fall on me." But through Roger's connection to the Poisson chart, his position within the war-scheme being essentially tied up with the way the rockets fall, it follows to say that "How the rockets fall" is almost synonymous with the bottom-line wartime identity of Roger Mexico: he is "how the rockets fall." But lots of people are -- Slothrop, Pirate, etc., which again echoes this idea of identities as ghostly things that can't be pinned down and individualized. "Roger will be forgotten, an amusing maniac in the rationalized power-ritual of the coming peace." A preempting of Cold War conditions, definitely, but also a proclamation of the importance of "idle" time, time that is not constructed and fractured and regimented by the State, as essential for identity (a link to Mindless Pleasures, maybe?)
I'm going off the rails a bit. Should have Part 2 on Tuesday, maybe Wednesday the latest.
Matt
That's a good comment, esp on the Hansel & Gretel subtext & its connections to German folk culture revival (the Brothers Grimm, etc) and its connection to Nazism. It's worth remembering, perhaps, that the H&G story is also part of Western narrative culture that Pynchon is trying to reinvent/reframe. (In a sense, the H&G play is like the Courier's Tragedy -- a Pynchonized classic.)
ReplyDeleteWhen I think about those pages in the novel, though, my overwhelming sense is that P. is indulging, for just a few pages, in a novel of erotic sensibility of the sort he'll jettison soon. "She is the British warm...and the wintering sparrow..." There's a whole literary tradition in these phrases, one that P. wants to ventriloquize, parody, & then move beyond. It's worth thinking about what breaks it up.
Obviously, as you note, it's partly The War (and Jeremy). And it's also the semi-pornographic tone TP will adapt toward sex for the rest of the novel. And, perhaps, his desire to reject any and all systems of ordering and regulation?
"Every We-system is also a They-system." Let's look for a Counterforce.