Pirate's Gift

[Alan Westrope]

Paul Mackin <mackin at allware.com> wrote:
> Was the whole novel a dream?

> Can't any  novel with dreamlike (cinamatic) qualities be read as a dream? 
> With or without an explicit dreamer/narrator. But what's going on in the 
> dream (the book)? For me, the dreamer or dreamer surrogate should be 
> awake at least part of the time. If Pirate is only dreaming he's awake near 
> the bottom of the second page, when does he wake up? In other words do 
> the parentheses balance? Any LISP programmers out there?

Pynchon may have been exposed to FORTRAN, BASIC, etc., at Cornell or
Yoyodyne.  And since he seems to have read everything, he's probably
perused a few lines of code in LISP, Pascal or c.  I doubt if parent-
hesization (ala programming or math formulas) had a direct influence on
this Aspect of the Novel, though.

> Come to think of it, the continuing-dream theory would explain the 
> presence of bananas in wartime London. He was only dreaming . . .

The dream-within-a-dream is a standard device of imaginative literature
(and -- jeepers! -- it can be EVEN MORE EFFECTIVE in movies).  It has been
used superbly by Borges, who is certainly among Pynchon's mentors.  E.g.,
check out "The Circular Ruins," "The God's Script," "The Secret Miracle,"
and "Everything and Nothing."  To me, this influence seems more plausible
than a Kute Komputer Korrespondence.

Now this dream-within-a-dream technique resonates, to me anyway, with
the fractal/chaos thread existing in parallel on this list, because
both deal with the idea of what programmers call "infinite recursion,"
and Barth calls "regressus in infinitum" in his essay "The Literature
of Exhaustion."  Since your time would be better spent (re)reading his
essay than my opinions, I'll just comment that I count Pynchon among
the handful of writers who have successfully transcended the "felt
ultimacy" described by Barth.  (Most writers, of course, don't even grapple
with it, and wouldn't know it if it snuck up an' bit 'em on the ass.)

God dreams Man, who then dreams God, who dreams Pynchon, who dreams
Pirate, who dreams the novel, probably including me reading it (but
do I get killed?)...I dream of Samuel F. B. Morse, falling asleep
150 years ago to dream about me using the Internet, then awakening
to shout, "What hath DoD wrought!?!!"


Alan Westrope                  <awestrop at nyx10.cs.du.edu>
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