Question

[Andrew Dinn]

Richard P. Muller writes:

> I have a question. I'm mid-way through Gravity's Rainbow, and I think
> I'm going to make it this time. One of the things that I've been
> curious about is why Slothrop says "a-and" all of the time. Does he
> stutter, perhaps when he's nervous (he seems to say "a-and" rather
> than "and" at stressful times) or am I missing something?

It doesn't usually indicate stress per se, rather Slothrop putting 2
and 2 together. Hence, perhaps hesitation might be nearer the mark.

I am tempted by the notion that a-and means `A for And' i.e. Slothrop
in paranoid mode starts assembling conjunctions. This neatly contrasts
with his anti-paranoid mode where he starts fabricating disjunctions
which in Latin and in Logic would be `V for Vel' (allow the
possibility of both and you get `AV for Aut') but in English or
Murrcan the nearest thing would have to be W-what or `W for What'.

Whatever the significance of the A in `a-and', I think it is right to
interpret the characters `A' and `V' as an alphabetic rendering of the
logic symbols for `and' and `or' and their function is to represent
the convergence on a determinate, rational, scientific, paranoid
reality or the divergence into indeterminate, irrational,
transcendent, antiparanoid unreality as represented by the Angel and
the Virgin, the A4 and the V2 etc.

There is a potential link-in with the Tractatus here - that quote in V
saying that `the world is all that is the case'. In the Tractatus
LudWit sees the world as a `totality of facts, not things', a grand
conjunction of atomic, irreducible truths. These truths are all
contingent since logically each such atomic fact must be able to be
either true or false independent of any other fact (otherwise it is
not atomic). The part of the world we know can be expressed as a
infinite conjunction of determinate truths

      A1 and A2 and not A3 and ...

anded with an infinite disjunction of tautologies representing the
facts we don't know

    A1 and A2 and A3 and ... and (B1 or not B1) and (B2 or not B2) ...

All knowledge is of this form. Mathematical knowledge (and some
scientific knowledge) has no contingent portion and hence is all of
the form

    (B1 or not B1) and (B2 or not B2) ...

However, LudWit finally argues that there is an inexpressible, and
therefore strictly unknowable, transcendent aspect to reality which
such expressions cannot communicate to those who do not already
recognise it. Such expressions have a form which corresponds to the
form of that which they describe but which they cannot express, they
can merely show. It is this inexpressible form which gives things
their significance. Only one can't say this coherently because all one
can say is truths of the form outlined above and any communication
effected is dependent upon the communicant identifying that what is
said has the relevant logical form. One might more conveniently
restate this as `Those who know know'.

Now in his later work Wittgenstein went on to pull apart this notion
that there is either a determinate atomic reality or an immanent,
transcendent, inexpressible form which serves to inform language
and/or things with significance. Similarly Pynchon goes on to reject
the paranoid/anti-paranoid dichotomy. Not only is the world not
reducible to empirically determinate truths about empirically
determined things, neither is it a projection arising from our own
fevered delusions, threatening us with a multiplicity of alternative,
equally uninformed and uninformative constructions. The middle path
between the horns of this dilemma is grounded in a concept of
`community' to which they both adhere.

So, ... How am I doing? What was the question?


Andrew Dinn
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there is no map / and a compass / wouldn't help at all