Day 21: still muddling on
I’m on page 567 of 776, so if I stop here for the night I’m still on track for the ~25pg/day schedule to finish by the end of the month. Here are some assorted thoughts:
The word “preterite” is used a lot. As noted by another reader, this word is used in Calvinist sense of humanity being divided among the Elect and the Preterite, though Pynchon more often uses it to refer to a kind of existential segregation: without heaven or hell coming into it, Slothrop and other characters are lost in life, free from or unsure of boundaries of allegiance or morality, and this puts them into a sort of hopeless state, muddling through one catastrophe to the next, damned because they were never meant to be saved and unable to find hope because of it. Pynchon also throws in a twist by showing us glimpses of Slothrop’s ancestors, Preterite in the Calvinist sense, either for emphasis or just to add to the confusion of this particular line of symbology.
“Moire” is also used with noticeable frequency. Pynchon will just toss the word in here and there, but I think at one point he did make explicit the use of the term to relate to the interference pattern of intersecting personalities. I suppose that Slothrop now being again in Tchitcherine’s clothes should be notable within this idea.
I haven’t been looking up any of the foreign words as I go through. I find I get the feel for a chapter better without the breaks, and I think that, falling back again to that other experience, V. left me jaded as to this habit’s effectiveness. I miss an important symbol here and there, but the Internet didn’t know a damn thing about Maltese. I think I’m able to pick up most of the German that matters, I think, and Pynchon was kind enough to spell out the connection between the Schwarzkommando and the S-Gerat.
I do wonder how much of this book is flying completely over my head without me even suspecting it. In V., Vheissu tied into the idea of a hollow earth, a new world underground with its entrances at the poles. The only reason I noticed that at all is because I had just read a Rotten Library article on the topic. Pynchon sure does toss a lot of weird stuff into his books.
There have been some extended interludes away from Slothrop, but there have only been brief returns to earlier characters like Pointsman and Prentice (look out, those P’s probably mean something, and the clue isn’t in the title this time around). I wonder where he’s going with them.