522
GEORGE LEVINE
Partly as a consequence of this sense of the power of objects, one
of the important aspects of Pynchon's style is the catalogue: the reverent,
uncannily precise notation of things. Echoing and parodying the tradi–
tions of naturalism, Pynchon describes objects not with the planned
banality of the writer determined to capture the "real," but with a
vision that the real is really a kind of science fiction, that the ordinary
is electric, alive, threatening, in process. To take a minor but character–
istic example, here is a description of Slothrop's desk, which
hasn't been cleaned down to the original wood since 1942. Things
have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma
that sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny red
and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea or cof–
fee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash,
very fine black debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, de–
composing library paste, broken aspirins ground to powder. Then
comes a scatter of paperclips, Zippo flints, rubber bands, staples,
cigarette butts and crumpled packs, stray matches, pins, nubs of
pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard to get helio–
trope and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons, Thayer's Slippery Elm
Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop's mother, Naline, all the way from
Massachusetts, bits of tape, string, chalk ... above that a layer of
memoranda, empty buff ration books, phone numbers, unanswered
letters, tattered sheets of carbon paper, the scribbled ukulele chords
to a dozen songs including " Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in
Ireland" ..., an empty Kreml hair tonic bottle, lost pieces to dif–
ferent jigsaw puzzles showing parts of the amber left eye of a
Weimaraner, the green velvet folds of a gown, slate blue veining in
a distant cloud, the orange nimbus of an explosion (perhaps a sun–
set), rivets in the skin of a Flying Fortress, the pink inner thigh
of a pouting pin-up girl . . . a few old weekly Intelligence Sum–
maries from G-2, a busted corkscrewing ukulele string, boxes of
gummed paper stars in many colors, pieces of a flashlight, top to a
Nugget shoe polish can in which Slothrop now and then studies his
blurry brass reflection, any number of reference books out of
ACHTUNG library back down the hall - a dictionary of technical
German, an F.D.
Special Handbook
or
Town Plan
- and usually,
unless it's been pinched or thrown away, a
News
0/
the World
somewhere too - Slothrop's a faithful reader.
Obviously, this goes on longer than it has to, except that it is fun
and, like so many other catalogues throughout the novel, it is not "back–
ground." Although it implies enough connections so that we are obliged
to bring to bear some of our conventional sense of how descriptions like
this work in conventional novels - after all, isn't this really about Slo–
throp - in fact the passage is about itself.
