I'm going to try out my close reading skills (that I'm not particularly confident about) here with a passage that particularly stuck me in the last section we read:
"Perfume, smoke, alcohol, and sweat glide though the house in turbulences too gentle to feel or see. It's a floating celebration no one's thought to adjourn: a victory party so permanent, so easy at gathering newcomer and old regular to itself, that who can say for sure which victory? which war?"(613).
It's interesting that of the four things that Pynchon mentions at the beginning of this excerpt, perfume and smoke are what I think of as vaporous. I suppose that perfume can be a liquid before sprayed, but in a party setting, I'd consider it a vapor drifting off a woman. Alcohol and sweat are, in "natural" form I suppose, liquids, although both can take on vaporous qualities. All of these things that are gliding through the house are thus mutable. But none of them can be felt or seen-- thus can they be smelled?
In the next sentence, Pynchon's use of the word "floating" ties in perfectly with the vapors of the previous sentence. It modifies the word "celebration," refering to the gathering at the house. "Floating" in terms of "celebration" refers to the ambiguity of the party that "no one's thought to adjourn;" it brings to mind the swarms of guests that seem to float in and out of the party sporadically (as well as, perhaps, their smells, as mentioned in the first sentence). This "floating" characteristic also allows for people to be drawn in, thus gathering the newcomers and keeping the old partygoers in.
The last part of the excerpt is my favorite part of it. The "floating" characteristic of the party makes it, in effect, endless; it streches on for so long that no one knows what they're celebrating anymore. I guess I found the question of "which war" especially poignant--is a war worth fighting (and winning) if people don't even know "which war" it is?
It's interesting that Pynchon would choose to describe this party as floating, especially since there seems to have been a theme of balloons running around for a while now. In class on (what I think was) Wednesday we brought up 2 passages that mentioned balloons in relation to Slothrop
"Slothrop feels his heart, out of control, inflate with love and rise quick as a balloon" (338)
"The fear balloons again inside his brain. It will not be kept down with a simple Fuck You...A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edge of his memory." (291)
Its sort of interesting that all these words about inflation and ballooning revolve around Slothrop. Did anyone notice it from earlier in the book, or is this part of his 'transformation'? It seems that these words all relate back to emotion too, which coincides with Slothrop becoming more of a "sap"....I dunno just something to think about.
I think floating also implies a sense of directionlessness. Like a ship floating out at sea which goes wherever the winds and ocean take it, this victory leaves the people with no obvious means toward "progress," a key element of the previous teleological systems. In the conventional sense, victory would imply the triumph of one methodology over another which in turn would set out a clear path forward. In effect, it is not clear what real change will occur as the result of the war.