Pages 249-269

This page-by-page annotation is organized by sections, as delineated by the seven squares (sprockets) which separate each section. The page numbers for this page-by-page annotation are for the original Viking edition (760 pages). Editions by other publishers vary in pagination — the newer Penguin editions are 776 pages; the Bantam edition is 886 pages.

Contributors: Please use a 760-page edition (either the original Viking edition with the orange cover or the Penguin USA edition with the blue cover and rocket diagram — there are plenty on Ebay for around $10) or search the Google edition for the correct page number. Readers: To calculate the Bantam edition use this formula: Bantam page # x 1.165. Before p.50 it's about a page earlier; as you get later in the book, add a page.

Finally, profound thanks to Prof. Don Larsson for providing the foundation for this page-by-page annotation.

Page 247

249.30 like Tenniel's Alice
Tenniel drew Alice for the original editions of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Page 249

249.5 & 6 Anglo vigilantes from Whittier
Whittier High School and Whittier College is where President Richard M. Nixon, President when GR was published, hailed from. [[1]]

This literary device tying Nixon to race riots and social repression works on literary license only, and in reviewing the historic situation it appears that the riots were not so much white vigilantes from Whittier attacking Zoot Suiters, as drunken Navy men gone wild and finding an easy target in Mexican American youth.

This seems doubly galling on Pynchon's part:

First, Whittier, CA, was and largely remains a Quaker community, named after the Quaker Abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Quakers are among the most pacificistic of peoples. In addition they embody many of the values Pynchon seems to support: egalitarianism, heirarchy-less assembly, the notion of a God available to all people unmediated by a priesthood or the elect, etc. Violence is not part of their program.

Second, Pynchon is throwing the blame for the riots on Whittier (this contributor has never been to Whittier) instead of what appears to be the true cause of the riots -- nasty, drunken, sailors -- those guys TRP hung out with for a while -- and then other service branches joining in the race baiting. Please see the PBS website and program for more information: The Zoot Suit Riots.

Richard Nixon, however, remains at the center of this Navy-Violence-Whittier-Quaker venn diagram. A Quaker from Whittier who in WWII served in the Navy. I, for one, could never figure how a Quaker president could bomb Cambodia or deal in such political slime.

Page 250

250.25-26 Sandoz (where, as every schoolchild knows, the legendary Dr. Hofmann made his important discovery)

That is, Albert Hofmann discovered the psychedelic effects of LSD-25 in 1943.

Page 252

252.19-20 penis-in-the-popcorn-box routine
Old urban 'legend', known as *Penis Surprise*. Urban Dictionary.

Page 253

253.03-4 this smile [Slothrop's own] asks from him more grace..
'Grace' is the last word of Against the Day and a key thematic concept therein.

253.20-21 heads for a bistro on the old-Nice side of La Porte Fausse
La Porte Fausse is a passage connecting the glamorous, touristy "modern"(19th century) centre of Nice with the crammed old town, which used to be a working-class district. It is called "The False Gate" because it looks as if it were just a gateway to a house. Passing to the other side seems to be an objective metaphor for entering the preterite world.

Page 255

255.26 it's Murray Smile
It would seem that this name is derived from Murray Wilson, Beach Boy Brian Wilson's abusive father, and the LP Smile, the legendary 1967 Beach Boys album that was never completed due to Brian's mental collapse and loss of will; Pynchon hung out with Brian during the legendary "Smile" Period — Pynchon and Brian Wilson

Page 257

257.31-32 The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image. The track runs in different networks now.
Cf. the railway network as a metaphor for parallel worlds or alternative histories in [COL 49].

Page 260

260.3 perpetual motion or as we like to call it Entropy Management
The whole passage reads somewhat like an ultra-condensed version of [COL49], Chapter Five.

260.9-10 robobobsters ... got a little goatee made out of steel wool.
Seems to be a bit anachronistic. After all, bebop was first promoted as "bebop" as late as 1944, and its popularity began to grow beyond Harlem in the summer of 1945. (The much-imitated goatee belonged to Dizzy Gillespie.)

260.30 "You interested in some L.S.D."
As a man from Sandoz, Mario Schweitar is aware of the hallucinogenic effect of LSD, discovered by Albert Hofmann in 1943. Slothrop, of course, has never head about it. Schweitar's "mournful" remark about the "wrong country" seems to be a complaint about Schwitzerland's neutrality and small market; the CIA and the U.S. Army used LSD in tests before it became a counter-culture fad.

Page 261

261.29 Gemüse-Brücke
Gemüsebrücke, or Gmüesbrugg, is the traditional name for the Rathausbrücke (a vegetable market used to be here).

Page 262

262.5-6 Wilhelm Tell Overture
The Rossini thread is picked up here after Rue Rossini in Nice. Another escape from Their gaze.

262.6-7 hope nobody was looking through that one-way glass
A recurrence of the "half-silvered images", introduced on the very first page; representing political power, which sees but cannnot be clearly seen. Sounds quite Foucauldian.

262.9 King Tiger tank
Königstiger (officially Panzerkampfwagen VI) was the most impressive German heavy tank in World War II, although it had several construction faults. Just like a Rolls, it was a kind of rarity; Porsche produced only 489 such tanks from late 1943 to March 1945. The comparison emphasizes the concept of WW II as a cluster of ambilateral business transactions.

Page 263

263.20-21 The paper is fifteen years old.
Another echo of COL 49, Ch 5, where another Hispanic anarchist, Jesús Arrabal has an issue of Regeneración from 1904 on his table at a greasy spoon.

Page 264

264.40-41 In ordinary times ... the center always wins. Its power grows with time, and that can't be reversed
This is a combination of Max Weber's notion of center and periphery with the Second Law of thermodynamics. So "decentralizing" in "extraordinary times" (p. 265.1-2) is an act of "entropy management".

Page 265

265.24-25 connections of many years' standing with the Republican underground
Meaning the Spanish Republic (1931-39), in which anarchists played a major role.

Page 267

267.35-36 Reformation country, Zwingli's town
Yes but this only highlights a strange omission: even the narrator fails to notice that Slothrop has just visited the real birthplace of Puritanism, that is, Geneva.

Page 268

268.5-6 as a mantra... they have been taught to speak inwardly oss
Buddhist mantras start with the syllable om, representing the Universe as inward vibration. Oss, with the voiceless (non-vibrating) sibilant is apparently an anti-mantra meaning bones, representing Nothing, just the escape of air.

268.34-35 step by step he, It, the Repressed, approaches
"It, the Repressed" is clearly Freudian terminology. Here, Jamf's "German-scientist mind, battered down by Death to only the most brute reflexes," seems to fade into Infant Tyrone's mind conditioned to the most brute reflexes by the German scientist; and that is the ambiguous "he" Slothrop is afraid of.