"Your Grandsire Cherrycoke, Lads, has ever kept his promise to remit to me, by way of certain Charter'd Companies, a sum precise to the farthing and punctual as the Moon,— to any address in the World, save one in Britain. Britain is his World, and he will persist, even now, in standing sham'd before it for certain Crimes of my distant Youth."
* * * * * * * * * *
Lines 41-42 Vulgarized:
"Yes, you're right, you little creeps. I am a Remittance Man. I did a thing as bad as failing to make an elephant lamp that lights when you pull the trunk causing me to lose my A average and am now an embarrassment to your father which makes him an embarrassment to all of Britain. So I get free money every month if I'm outside of Britain and he gets to pretend I don't exist. It's a good deal because who would want to associate with a prick like that anyway? I'd stay away from him for free."
Subtext:
I know this section is called "Subtext" and I know I often just discuss the "Right-there-on-the-surface-text." I know! I just wanted you to know I know and that I don't care, especially when most people have such poor reading comprehension that the superficial meaning of a line becomes too difficult to explicate. I mean, have you seen Twitter? Most responses to a person's tweet sound like somebody replied to the wrong tweet because you read it and think, "How does that have anything to do with this?!" Then you slam your hand in the closet door four or five times just to feel something other than the constant low level buzz of irritation that has become our daily lives. Sometimes I even do subtext in the vulgarized section which is the section that's supposed to deal with the text's literal meaning. I'm just wacky like that! One time, I walked through China's Forbidden City waving my arms around in a mildly strange way and said, "Look at me! What do you think they're all thinking? Crazy American!"
I didn't actually do that. Some old New Yorker said that to his old wife while we walked through the Forbidden City. They were a tough couple to be around but that stupid moment in their lives made me love them forever.
So the text and/or subtext (I really can't be bothered to differentiate at this point. I'm not an academic and I don't have an advisor tutting my word and style choices) is that Reverend Cherrycoke was a rebellious lad who committed some atrocious crime. Except it's 18th century Britain so that could mean he was a normal kid who did something so mundane, Seinfeld couldn't have created an episode surrounding the event. Whatever he did (will we find out or is this another thing Pynchon loves to do? Let the reader know a character has committed some grave sin but then never let the reader know what that sin was? Like Lew Basnight in Against the Day (which I haven't finished. So maybe at some point we learn what Lew's crime was? (It was sodomy. It has to be sodomy. His name is Lube Ass Night!))).
As a parent, how do you entangle your reputation with your child's reputation to such a degree that you can't even have the child live in the same country as you when they sully theirs? What a miserable person Grandsire Cherrycoke must be! If my kid did something terrible, I would just say, "What a horrible individual with their own agency and free will which has nothing at all to do with me! I contributed one tiny sperm to that monster! Why are you punishing me now for his egregious sins?! You don't think, now, at this moment, hindsight being what it is, that I wouldn't have drowned him in a barrel if I'd known?!"
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