“The Jungle”
Book 1, chapter 22; Book 2, chapter 17
Characters
1.22 56 year old man (unnamed)
2.17 unnamed woman (probably) (spose it could be a man.)
General Subject/ Plot
1.22: Commercialism. Older or middle-aged man watching golden era hollywood movie is disturbed by blatantly sexual and futuristic commercial for a soda…
2.17: a woman, probably having suffered a traumatic episode, attempts to solve basic questions about her identity and predicament.
Motifs
1.22: Tarzan, cardboard, alcohol (“majorska” vodka),
2.17: bathroom, smoking, tiled floor, raining, black man, detective, (Ray, Warren, Claire, Pierre, Inez, Cora…)
Notes
In the first “The Jungle” the jungle referred to is the “cardboard jungle” of the broadcast of a Hollywood production of Tarzan. (For “cardboard” see first “Apartment”).
In the second, the idea of the jungle directly refers, in a figurative sense, to the extreme confusion of a character who has been drugged (we think of the woman in the first “Another Small Adventure”), and indirectly (I suppose) to the maziness of the narrative itself — the reader has many of the same confusions as the character. (And we remember from that first “Another Small Adventure” that it was that “writer bastard” who had given the girl the drug.) (Perhaps the book itself, a papery representation of something bewildering, is a sort of cardboard jungle.)
Perhaps Sorrentino contrasts here also the fake jungle of Hollywood with the bewildering jungle of real life or of his novel.
The robot, contrasting with the primitiveness of Tarzan, suggests to me the ‘hi-tech’ of the second “Saturday Afternoon” and the specific age given to the character makes me curious too (fifty-six? the eleven of the second “Saturday”?) — santa was selling soda on TV in the second “pair of deuces.”
Like a number chapters (second in the diner, second saturday afternoon) the first jungle involves a man trying to understand an obscure fleeting emotion he has: but I can no more say what’s troubling the man than he can. Is it what troubles the father in the second “saturday afternoon” who was also watching an old movie? (That man had rented his movie.)
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 