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MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
window, at some point, comes the sound of a kazoo, playing a
tune of astounding tastelessness, probably 'Who Dat Man?' from
A Day at the Races (in more ways than one). It is one of Groucho
Marx's vulgar friends. The sound is low, buzzing, and guttural.
Bette Davis freezes, tosses her head, flicks her cigarette. 'What,'
she inquires, 'is that?' Margaret Dumont smiles, throws our her
chest, looks down her nose. 'Well it sounds,' she replies, 'like a
kazoo.
For all Slothrop knows, it was a kazoo. (619)
Slothrop's dream has borrowed a voice from that Marching
Kazoo Contraband that buzzes, low and guttural, all through the
novel. On the other side of sleep, the sound is that of a small
plane that Pirate Prentice is flying into the Zone, into the vast
Plot-Designs of history and novel. One-way traffic across a
frame: such is Slothrop's dream, and such is the scene which he
dreams: Groucho sees in but Margaret Dumont doesn't see out.
Davis' pompous 'What'-an echo of Richard Nixon's on the
previous page-is exactly in the spirit of the humorless Establishmentarians, under Margaret Dumont, who always so dauntlessly
repressed the Brothers' subversions, so that Groucho enjoyed a
perilous safety-"invisible," like Rocketman. We share also a
movie-trivia joke with Pynchon (and with Slothrop? how heavy
is the traffic?): A Day at the Races is about horse racing, and
when the Brothers sing "Who Dat Man?" they are being danced
and cakewalked around by a mass of lovable Hollywood
Darkies, hence "races in more ways than one."
Pynchon thus imposes dreamlike or movielike frames on
history, inside which we sometimes see recognizably real events
and images, sometimes imaginary and preposterous ones, sometimes surreal combinations: to this film of life's self-imagination
in history the response actualized is a paranoia which in turn
helps to actualize more history-which, Pynchon implies, is
indeed so "made." Leering out from the vague demesnes of the
novel's Theys are faces we know-Walter Rathenau, Hugo
Stinnes, J. Edgar Hoover, Allen Dulles, anachronistic Nixon;
Pynchon's Chemical Instrumentality for the Abnormal, Committee on Idiopathic Archetypes, and Committee on Incandescent Anomalies, all surely do say CIA. By Pynchon's vertiginous
inside-out epistemology, the apocalypse-fear that visits the
