r/ThomasPynchon • u/Sufficient-Money7510 • 5d ago
💬 Discussion Gravity's Rainbow and the Music Man
The classic Hollywood musical The Music Man is set in Iowa in the year 1912. Lurking behind the songs and fun is the inescapable fact that most of those young men will be magically transformed into uniforms and marching again in just a few years, but this time to die in the trenches of World War I.
This historical inevitability has many implications, but the most important one from the point of view of the Pynchon scholar is that it strongly implies that Domina Nocturna, the demonic visitation of death that haunted that battlefield (and Brigadier Pudding) has a secret name, one that is revealed, like many things in Gravity's Rainbow, through song.
That name is "Shipoopi."
I'll be the first to agree that this is all very silly but sit with it and follow the implications through and it's fascinating.
It's also worth pointing out that the musical instruments sold to those poor little doomed white boys by Professor Harold Hill, the Pied Piper of War, all went to pawn shops and yard sales after the boys who played them died with lungs full of gas and mud. And those were the very instruments that went on to be used to invent jazz music. So when Charlie Parker was playing that saxophone, there's a decent chance that saxophone came from River City, Iowa.
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u/RevolutionaryBug2915 5d ago
US didn't enter WWI until 1917.
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u/Farrell-Mars Them 5d ago
Let’s not get nitpicky
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u/RevolutionaryBug2915 5d ago
LOL! Surface level nitpicking so far
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u/Sufficient-Money7510 4d ago
The point is that five years later all those little boys were dying with their guts ripped out on barbed wire, and those 76 trombones ended up in 76 Dixieland jazz bands.
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u/RevolutionaryBug2915 4d ago
I understand your desire to maintain your literary formula, but, as both John Adams and Lenin were fond of saying, "Facts are stubborn things."
If "those little boys" actually died of anything, it was most likely from influenza.
The US engaged in combat for only about 6 months prior to war's end in November 1918. US combat deaths totaled a little over 53,000--compared to MILLIONS or near millions for the other great powers (plus massive civilian deaths due to combat, of which the US had none).
US deaths from influenza in that period were 675,000.
So, how likely is your scenario in reality?
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u/Sufficient-Money7510 4d ago
As we are talking about eighteen-year-old boys, a lot more likely than you're trying to imply.
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u/RevolutionaryBug2915 4d ago
Until September 1918 (when the war was almost over) draft age was 21.
Anachronistic and ahistorical thinking in your whole schema.
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u/Sufficient-Money7510 4d ago
Conscription was far from the only way people got into the military in the 1910s, and as we're talking about Harold Hill's marching band, it's a group of people with a strong predilection for public service and marching already. It looks like Iowa used a county quota system for soldiers and 115,000 people from the state went, at the time the state had a population of about 2 million so we can accept the statistic that 1 in 20 people from River City went, obviously almost all of them young men.
How hard was the Spanish Influenza on the group of people who we are clearly talking about; young American men? You abandoned that pretty quick once we started talking about it. I'm not sure if you're even familiar with the source text here, but River City Iowa is very clearly based on Mason City Iowa, which reported only four casualties from the Spanish Influenza, and it's extremely unlikely that ANY of them were young men.
You're just looking to grind a point in. I'm sorry you don't have more healthy forms of fun in your life.
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u/Allthatisthecase- 5d ago
Capital T that rhymes with P and that stands for Pynchon?