Chaos, Fractals & GR

[WildForest at aol.com]

As the ancient redwood falls to the logger, or a sweet patch of No. Cal. 
weed to the inveterate CAMP agent, so too does the text of Gravity's 
Rainbow give way to the desperate critic.  Everyone must pursue 
their own individual deconstructionist niche, I guess, a private 
peephole on the Work, to sing as it were a solo rather than a chorus.  
Now everybody, indeed...

Don't get me wrong.  I've succombed to similar solipsisms, having 
written my dissertation on a comparison of Gaddis's JR and TRP's GR, 
a cross-textual analysis that was as absurd and meaningless as 
anything ever contemplated by Derrida and his crowd.  Fun at the 
time, embarrassing as hell today.

But 15 years later, and only a few days into the bracing disputes of 
this newsgroup about what the Master may have known about the 
then secret science of chaos theory and fractal imagery (knowledge 
passed on to him, no doubt, the whiz kids up here at Boeing, all those 
many years ago, who, natch, are always so far ahead of the curve), a 
question scrapes at the information-saturated edges of consciousness:  
Will we have to stop watching the text?  This text, in particular, that 
once seemed so self-contained, animate, and full of mindless, if not 
entirely polymorphous, pleasures.  

Has Pynchon criticism slid into an entropic-like drift toward 
rendering the living page itself inanimate, where the rainbow colors 
of the book are reduced to red, black, and white, where the glorious 
middles are excluded and the remains reassembled to fit some pre-
conceived notion of what the book's architecture should look like 
(parabola or mandela? Poisson distribution or Puritanical 
Predetermination? Norbert Weiner overload or Wittgensteinnian 
crack-up? Jerry Lewis slapstick or Frizt Langian 
expressionism?)...even if the evidence for these theories from the 
language itself is only accidental, statistical, imposed from the 
outside like a Hermenuedic stencil, a kind of critical narcissism, a 
connect-the-dots picture where, mirabile dictu, the critic adds most 
of the dots, or some textual conspiracy theory worthy of the Christic 
Institute, or even Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck, himself?

Am I alone in feeling that Caroline Spurgeon's book Shakespeare's 
Imagery reduces instead of enhances a reading of, say, Timon of 
Athens?  That that damn Northrup Frye turned the hilarious 
Euripides into a kind of weather-obsessed sourpuss?  Perhaps, 
someone should ask Edward Teller his opinion about the ballistic 
imagery of GR...I am sure he could contribute a chilling insight or 
two, eh?

>From the evidence presented so far in this discussion I am convinced 
that a Chaos approach could easily be developed for the long poems 
of the French symbolist Gerard de Nerval, or even Ovid, for that 
matter.  Did they acquire this information through some sort of 
dabbling in the dark arts?

I guess my question is this:  If this technocratic approach must be 
thrown at Pynchon, why not apply it as an explication of Vineland, 
which explicitly, and recursively, plays with fractals, chaos theory, 
and the like?  Or better, yet, why not play mathematical games with 
Samuel Beckett's Watt--now there's a novel that is just begging to be 
buggered by this kind of criticism.  

GR's is as encyclopedic a novel as yer likely to come across this 
century, including that grim prude Proust and the wonderful lecher 
James Joyce.  After reading it 20 times or so, I've concluded that if it 
ain't there explicitly, it ain't there implicitly...no matter what those 
Freudian critics may argue about the subconscious's irresistable urge 
to slip a few secret joists into the novel's superstructure.

This is, of course, my limited and Billy Pilgrim-like pov, guided by an 
unremitting instinct to side with the Glozing Neuters of the world 
rather than the Pointsman's.

BTW my favorite name in GR:  Thomas Gwenhidwy (Go and hide 
away?)

Also for those interested in reading a collection of Pynchon's letters 
to the editor of a small No. Cal. weekly (the best damn paper in  
Boonville) consider a subscription to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, 
which will soon publish them all.  They were written while TP lived 
in Humbolt Co. while working on Vineland under the wonderful 
pseudonym:  Wanda Tanasky.

Jeffrey St. Clair
Stumptown, Oregon

"...across the snow's footprints and tiretracks finally to the path you 
must create by yourself, alone in the dark.  Whether you want it or 
not, whatever seas you crossed, the way home..."