Prelude to GRGR(7)

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

Foax,
Tomorrow starts GRGR(7)--
As a companion to what Chris and I have put together for that
discussion, I am herein posting a 10 page verbatim excerpt from my
dissertation which offers a close rea ding of the episode (Episode 14 if
you count them sprocket holes as episode breaks; pp. 92-113 in Viking
edition).  I'm posting this in great trepidation, given all the abuse
that pointy headed edus (or is that edues) take on the list.  Maybe also
in defiance of that trepidation--I yam who I yam, to quote Popeye
Blaine.  I admit, most diss's ain't worth much of our valuable time, but
I will say, a little defensively, that it's not half bad, if only
because I tried really really hard not to write in dreaded
dissertationese.   This reading complements what Chris will post
tomorrow as our *official* GRGR(7) offering.  Given the density and
importance of this episode (introducing Blicero, Katje, Gottfried and
Enzian; developing themes of--that's right--colonialism, as well as
religion, metaphysics, etc; the extinction of the Dodos; the use of
film; a virtuoso play on point-of-view; plus some kinky sex and a fairy
tale), all this commentary seems not excessive, maybe even necessary. My
reading here centers on the use of tropes of doubling and repetition in
the episode.  It focuses on narrative technique as opposed to historical
or ideological resonances.   You may read it or not.

The title of the diss is "Beyond the Zero: The Conditions of Uncertainty
in 'Gravity's Rainbow' "  The term "actualism" used here comes from
Susan Strehle,   "Actualism: Pynchon's Debt to Nabokov."  Contemporary
Literature 24.1 (1983) 30-50.  I have adapted her term and extended her
ideas in an analysis thoughout the diss of how the text of GR exhibits a
range of "lived" effects.  Though unpublished, this dissertation is
copyrighted.


john mascaro

*************************************************************



Doubling and Repetition in Episode 14 of GRAVITY'S RAINBOW



	Episode 14's importance to the narrative line seems to be its
introduction of several major characters.  Here we first encounter
Katje Borgesius, Gottfried, Blicero and Enzian, whose intricately
linked stories emerge amid shadow, ambiguity and uncertainty.  The
episode is also extremely important on the level of technique, in
showing how technique and theme are indissolubly wedded.

	Episode 14 opens with yet another variation on the technique
of dislocating the reader by placing him into an alternate frame of
reality.  And here the metaphor "frame" is appropriate because the
medium used is a film, rather than the kind of explicitly textual
examples seen at the openings of episodes 10-13.  Film thus becomes
another member of the set of analogues of "other worlds" we've already
encountered:  dream, seance, hallucination, text.  All share the
primary characteristic of creating a charged space wherein ordinary
laws of causality need not apply.  In the present case, the episode's
opening paragraph (on page 92) describes a film, but it is at first
ambiguous as to whether the reader is witnessing a film being watched
(by as yet unnamed characters who would have to be present as
watchers), or a film being made (by an equally unidentified film
maker).


In silence, hidden from her, the camera follows as she moves
deliberately nowhere longlegged about the room, an adolescent wideness
and hunching to the shoulders, her hair not bluntly Dutch at all, but
secured in a modish upsweep with an old tarnished silver crown[. . . .]

The paragraph's second sentence reduces some of the ambiguity by
describing the film equipment, and the immediate setting:


Widest lens-opening this afternoon, extra tungsten light laid on, this
rainiest day in recent memory, rocket explosions far away to south and
east now and then visiting the maisonette[. . . .]

And the following sentence, the first sentence of paragraph two,
finally establishes the nature of the scene by revealing exactly who is
present and their roles: "She's alone in the house, except for the
secret cameraman and Osbie Feel, who's out in the kitchen doing
something mysterious with a harvest of mushrooms from up on the roof."
In a way that closely parallels the beginning of episode nine, each of
the episode's opening three sentences progressively clarifies the
reader's initially uncertain experience.  The episode's opening
paragraphs also create a filmic atmosphere in the text.  And as always
in this novel, stylistic facts are intimately wedded to narrative
content, which here is a series of interlocking jump cuts back in time
linking several of the novel's important plot and thematic lines.

	Thus, as we are in the process of learning about Katje's past
and how Pirate recruited her away from the Germans and the sinister
designs of Captain Blicero in order to bring her over into the equally
sinister arms of "The White Visitation," we suddenly find ourselves
inside of Blicero's consciousness, and we learn something of his
history.  We are also introduced to Enzian at this time.  The narrative
then shifts back to Katje, but only momentarily, though it's long
enough for Katje and Pirate to have the above-noted conversation, on
page 106, which echoes Reg Le Froyd's words from two episodes earlier.
The narrative then jumps back to Dutch colonial exploits in the
seventeenth century, and the story of Katje's ancestor. Frans Van der
Groov, and the extermination of the dodoes, one of the novel's more
well-known incidents.  The narrative flow in the episode is thus
faceted, beveled, prismatic, with the reader moving through shards of
narrative lines, each reflective of the others, through improbable
strings of connection.

	In the actualistic terms I have been employing to help isolate
and describe the creation of fundamental uncertainties in the text,
this episode's "essence" reflects the hallucinatory presence of Osbie
Feel and his magic mushrooms, quietly off at the edge of the frame
throughout.  The text silently reacts "sympathetically" to the presence
of the reality-altering mushrooms, and the form of the episode is
imbued with the characteristic shifts and refractions of such an
altered vision.  The situation is the same as those encountered (and
discussed) earlier, particularly in episode seven when Roger inhales
the ether meant for the dog (page 44), and throughout episode 10 with
Slothrop under sodium amytal.  And as in those cases, though there may
well be a coherent network of narrative connections to give the text a
"rational" foundation, its presence is only perceived retroactively,
under critical scrutiny.  The initial reading experience is almost
incoherent, and deeply uncertain.  In episode 14, the narrative and
thematic cross-connections are extremely dense, and merely to track
them indicates the complexity of the episode.  To attempt to spell out
all of the levels of significance in the episode's 21 pages would
require an exhausting and dizzying exegesis.  But neither paraphrase
nor explication, valuable as they may be in their own right, plays a
major role in the initial experience of reading the episode.

	That experience, which I describe above as "almost incoherent,"
is, however, not completely so.  There are surface features of the text
which serve as transition points among the various narrative strands
being unwound.  The main such feature in this episode is the use of
verbal repetition.  At particular places in the narrative, the uttering
of a specific phrase, either by a character or by the narrator, signals
a shift in the text's perspective.  These repeated verbal structures
give a kind of surface coherence to the narrative, though they do not
serve to "explicate" or interpret it.  I mention this non-explanatory
aspect of the game of verbal repetition in order to stress the role of
the various actualizing techniques the text employs.  The actualizing
games and structures of the novel's textual surface are above all
agents of experience, and only secondarily (when they are at all)
agents of understanding.  When we go back to reexamine what it is we
have experienced, then, perhaps, we perceive these structures in a new
light (partly in the light of our earlier, immediate experience of
them), which can aid understanding.

	We can speculate, for example, that the importance of
repetition in the narrative is meant to underscore the important theme
of doubleness.  And here in episode 14, where the strange twin-like
pair of Katje and Gottfried make their appearance in the story, such
techniques of doubling and repetition are highly appropriate.  Doubling
as a technique also connects to notions of parallelism and mapping
which are so important to the overall arch of the novel.  I reiterate
here that the essence of my reading of the novel sees it as one
enormous "repetition": the recalling of a world's history, the
replaying of that history mapped onto the twinned "real" world in which
it is being replayed.  Two words, two worlds, or two twins, a boy and a
girl--the second element of the pair may be identical to the first, but
it is different.  The difference between the two is that
infinitesimally small gap, the Deltat, which occurs in so many
different guises throughout Gravity's Rainbow.  And as always, it is
the narrative voice which describes itself best.  I have already noted,
in my discussion of the Reg Le Froyd incident in episode 12, the
narrator's comment preceding Katje's echoing of Le Froyd's last words,
which describes how "stones the water has left behind shining black
wait like writing in a dream, about to make sense printed here along
the beach, each fragment so amazingly clear yet" (106), which exactly
describes the effect of reading each separate fragment of this highly
fragmented episode.  A more telling comment comes a few pages earlier,
during the scenes of Blicero and Enzian in the Sudwest, when the
narrator describes how Blicero "feels the potency of every word: words
only an eye-twitch away from the things they stand for" (100).  This
image, which recurs in slightly different form at key points throughout
Gravity's Rainbow, is virtually a summary of the state of the novel.
The eye-twitch is, of course, analogous to the Deltat; they both
represent that infinitely small and at the same time infinitely large,
charged space wherein ordinary laws are suspended.  Anything can occur
during such an eye-twitch.  A word from 30 pages earlier may be
repeated.  A book, or a world, may be born, blossom and die in the
infinitesimal moment between a rocket's blast and the sound of its
approach.  One might here recall the opening of this episode, quoted
above, with its reference to the repeated rocket explosions off in the
distance which form a backdrop to the episode's action.  These rockets
in the background are referred to again, and another image of a charged
moment is evoked, two pages further on, just as the text is about to
make its first major scene shift: "for the celluloid instant
poised--the translucent guardian of a rainfall shaken through all day
by rocket blasts near and far" (94).

	The text gathers itself together at this nodal point, and now
the technique of repetition, echo, or doubling which articulates the
linkages in this episode begins in earnest.  At this moment Katje looks
in the mirror, and this act of repetition or doubling signals the shift
to Captain Blicero, his first incarnate appearance in the novel, and
the dark erotic tale of Katje, Blicero and Gottfried playing Hansel and
Gretel in the forest.  This narrative fragment ends five pages later,
and the shift out of this scene and into Blicero's time with Enzian in
the Sudwest is also marked by a repetition, here of a key word.  The
narrator has us inside of Blicero's consciousness (even though we are
in a flashback ostensibly occurring within Katje's consciousness).
This is how Blicero makes the shift from thoughts of the Hansel and
Gretel menage to thoughts of himself with Enzian (as with Blicero, it
is also Enzian's first appearance in the novel):


Where will they go, where shelter the night?  The improvidence of
children . . . and the civil paradox of this little state, whose base is
the same Oven which must destroy it. . . .  But every true god must be
both organizer and destroyer.  Brought up in a Christian ambience, this
was difficult for him to see until his journey to Sudwest: until his own
African conquest. (99; emphasis added)

It is the repetition of the word "destroy" which triggers the scene
shift.  Memories of Enzian continue for two pages or so, and the shift
to the next scene, which is a return to thoughts of Katje, is mediated
by a paragraph, rendered from Blicero's point of view, which both
explicitly discusses and is literally built out of doublings and
repetitions.  The texture of repetition is so dense that the entire
paragraph must be quoted.  I have underscored all words, phrases or
ideas which are either part of one of the repeated patterns or which
refer to the act of repetition or doubling (words emphasized in the
original passage are in italics):


"Liebchen [Blicero says to Enzian], this is the other half of the earth.
In Germany you would be yellow and blue."  Mirror-metaphysics.
Self-enchanted by what he imagined elegance, his bookish symmetries. . .
. And yet why speak so purposeless to the arid mountain, the heat of the
day, the savage flower from whom he drank, so endlessly . . . why lose
those words into the mirage, the yellow sun and freezing blue shadows in
the ravines, unless it was prophesying, beyond all predisaster syndrome,
beyond the terror of contemplating his middle age however glancingly,
however impossible the chance of any "providing"--beyond was something
heaving, stirring, forever below, forever before his words, something
then that could see a time coming terrible, at least as terrible as this
winter and the shape to which the War has now grown, a shape making
unavoidable the shape of one last jigsaw piece: this Oven-game with the
yellowhaired and blueeyed youth and silent doubleganger Katje (who was
her opposite number in Sudwest? what black girl he never saw, hidden
always in the blinding sun, the hoarse and cindered passage of the
trains at night, a constellation of dark stars no one, no anti-Rilke,
had named . . .) --but 1944 was much too late for any of it to matter.
Those symmetries were all prewar luxury.  Nothing's left him to
prophesy.  (101-02)

	Note how the notion of repetition is reinforced in this complex
passage through the unity of its content and the rhetorical structure
of its sentences, which are mainly built on repetition and
parallelism.  This paragraph signals another scene shift, this time
from Blicero's consciousness back to Katje's, returning the reader to
the episode's "present" time frame.  We stay with Katje for a bit,
learning more about her defection, with Pirate Prentice's help, from
the Germans to the allies. Then on page 106 the large scale
repetition-game occurs as Katje repeats Le Froyd's words from episode
12, an incident I have already discussed.  Here I want to note how this
repetition signals another scene shift, this time to a night in the
unspecified recent past and a conversation between Pirate and Osbie
Feel, who is still, of course, under hallucinogenic influence.  This
desultory conversation goes on for about a page.  Near its end, Pirate
is discussing why he carries a particular type of gun, a Mendoza, which
no one else in "the Firm" uses.  Pirate defends his choice: "Am I going
to let the extra weight make a difference?  It's my crochet[. . . .]"
(107)  Shortly after this seemingly unimportant comment, the scene
shifts again, this time to the story of Frans Van der Groov and the
dodoes.

	At first it appears that this particular scene shift has broken
the pattern of the episode, because it is not marked by any obvious
occurrence of the repetition game.  The reader follows Frans' story
from page 108 to page 111.  It is a fascinating story, much discussed
in the literature, and connected to the theme of the mapping of
alternate worlds.  But its main importance to the present discussion
lies in the way the scene with Frans ends.  On page 111 the narrator is
discussing the nature of Frans' faith when he suddenly shifts into
direct quotation, although the speaker is not identified (it may be
Frans referring to himself in the third person):


But as for faith . . . he can believe only in the one steel reality of
the firearm he carries.  "He knew that a snaphaan would weigh less, its
cock, flint and steel give him surer ignition--but he felt a nostalgia
about the haakbus . . . he didn't mind the extra weight, it was his
crochet. . . ." Pirate and Osbie Feel are leaning on their roof ledge[.
. . .]

The reader with a jolt suddenly encounters the repetition of Pirate's
earlier words on the same subject, which presaged the onset of Frans'
story, and, as seen in the quoted passage, immediately the scene shifts
to return us to Pirate, with perhaps a hint that the speaker of the
quotation, with its repeated words, might have been Pirate himself,
especially given the tone of the statement, with the emphasis on "his
[i.e., Frans'] crochet," as opposed to, one would suppose, "my [i.e.,
Pirate's] crochet," the implied contrasting statement.  So it turns out
that this scene shift is also marked, at both ends, by a repetition
game.  Again the game is a time-delayed one, similar to the Le
Froyd-Katje repetition though on a smaller scale, with both occurrences
appearing within the same episode and separated by only four pages,
instead of the three episodes and 33 pages separating the two halves of
the earlier game.  Above all, the episode's structural pattern remains
consistent--every shift of scene thus far in episode 14 has been marked
by some type of repetition game.

	The scene with Pirate and Osbie on the roof ledge is the
penultimate scene in episode 14.  It is very brief, less than a page
long, and blends almost imperceptibly with the onset of the episode's
final scene, set at "The White Visitation."  This final scene completes
masterfully the episode's structure of repetitions.  It takes us back
to the film being made as the episode opened, and reveals the nature of
that film.  The film of Katje will be used to condition the octopus
Grigori.  The octopus will in turn be used as a means of bringing
Slothrop and Katje together in Part 2 of the novel.  But the reader
does not know this at the present time.  The importance at this moment
is the way the episode ends:


The reel is threaded, the lights are switched off, Grigori's attention
is directed to the screen, where an image already walks.  The camera
follows as she moves deliberately nowhere longlegged about the room, an
adolescent wideness and hunching to the shoulders, her hair not bluntly
Dutch at all, but secured in a modish upsweep with an old, tarnished
silver crown. . . . (113)

 The reader notes with a shock of recognition that the final sentence
is virtually identical to the sentence which opened the episode.  And
whereas the opening sentence was used to describe, with some ambiguity,
a film being made, here it is clear that the exact same words are
describing that same film being watched.  The reader, with any sort of
attention span at all, cannot help but superimpose the episode's
closing sentence, when he encounters it, on its twin sentence at
episode's opening.  The effect of this superimposition--the conjoining
of two separate realities (film being made/film being watched) through
the interface of a twinned sequence of words--powerfully actualizes the
notion of "mapped" alternate frames of reality in which episode 14
deals.