Lets Kenosha Again

[Mark Robberds]

Just thought I'd jump in on this Kenosha thing.
I gave a paper at the Warwick Sleep Deprivation
Festival about this episode and the 'trip' that 
follows it. Hanjo Berressem's work on Pynchon and
Lacan inspired my initial reading of this scene.
If a Lacanian notion of subjectivity offers an 
understanding of Slothrop's character and lack
thereof in the text as a whole, then the Kid episode
offers a condensed version of the formula. It seems to me 
that these musings might be a play upon Lacan's notion
that subjectivity exists in the field of language alone,
and is therefore inherently unstable. Accordingly, in each
version of of the'Kid' identity shifts even though the
wording remains the same. Since we are told that these are
Slothrop's musings they seem to reiterate on a smaller scale
his attempts to find himself in language. In this episode, and in the 
latter half of the novel, these attempts result in him assuming
a series of different identities.
    As the episode proceeds, however, the distinction between an
inner self and its representation in the other begins to blur. The 
space between these poles, and the toilet world is such a space, seem
to follow a different logic. Lacan's construction of the subject
seems less applicable in this space than Kristeva's notion of the 
deject. Kristeva  develops the idea of the deject along with
the process of abjection in Powers of Horror. Unlike the Lacanian
subject, who asks 'who am I?' the deject is more likely to ask
'where am I?'. Accordingly Slothrop's stool trip produces a series
of radical ontological ruptures, as does the latter half of the text,
in which the question of identity is placed under erasure.

Mark