GRGR(7) Discussion Opener
ckaratnytsky at nypl.org
ckaratnytsky at nypl.org
Fri Dec 13 12:23:20 CST 1996
Owwwww! Joh-ohnnn! That ra-zor blade just cut my *tongue*! Wait a
minute. Put your leg on my shoulder, a-and...
Oh. He-lloooo. Chris. Get up, Chris. Get *up*.
Uh, ah... A-hem.
Friends --
GRGR(7) is being brought to you by Jumpin' John Mascaro and Crispy
Chris Karatnytsky, who each wanted to tackle this episode So Much that
they decided to do it together. (To be truthful, they've been a
little concerned that this episode warms their Ovens sooo well, but
that's fodder for more than just a GRGR, nicht wahr, Liebchen?)
GRGR(7), our only scheduled discussion for December, runs from pages
92 to 113. It begins, "In silence, hidden from her, the camera
follows..." and ends "...with an old tarnished silver crown."
As a bonus, John Mascaro will be posting an 11-page chunk of his
dissertation, which deals with this section.
Discussion for GRGR(8), pages 114 - 136, opens after the New Year, on
10 January 1997. The text begins, "It was very early morning," and
ends "...whatever seas you have crossed, the way home..." Presumably,
Andrew will have made contact by then and he (or Joe Varo) will either
take the matches away from us kids and restart the fire himself, or
will let us burn down the house trying to light it ourselves.
The full itinerary for the Gwoup Weed can be found at
www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~andrew/pynchon-group-read.html
Happy Holidays to all, whatever seas you cross.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
p.92
1.) "In silence, hidden from her, the camera follows as she moves
deliberately nowhere longlegged about the rooms[...]"
Note the ambiguous point of view of this opening. (It takes a few
paragraphs for the reader to be able to determine who's watching who,
for example.) This episode is filled with abrupt shifts in points
of view, a-and the narrative technique used here recalls the series of
vignettes that comprise Chapter 3 of V. There has been some
discussion recently of TRP's "filmic" style with regard to the close
of the previous episode. Anyone care to make any further remarks?
What's happening here, plotwise? Where are we?
2.) "[...]this rainiest day in recent memory[...]"
The atmosphere of gray, dreary rain (excepting the scene on Mauritius)
forms a leitmotif in this episode and amplifies the dark sexuality of
the Blicero/Gottfried/Katje menage. It may also be a compliment to the
dank, dark earth in which Osbie grows his special mushrooms (the
presence of which, off at the edge of the frame throughout the entire
episode, might well account for the surrealistic, convoluted,
self-refracting nature of the narrative). The rainy weather may also
play a role in the episode's mystical, mandala-like, fourfold nature:
Water to go with Earth (Osbie's mushrooms), Fire (the Oven), and Air
(the pattern of references to air raids, rocket launchings, landings,
etc). (This would also fit in with the four humors, which were
discussed recently.)
p. 93
3.) "But she happens to've glanced in just at the instant Osbie
opened the echoing oven."
The "echoing oven" resonates for Katje with memories of her sexual
slavery with Gottfried under the control of Captain Weissmann, who
makes his first appearance in the novel as Dominus Blicero. Who is
Weissmann/Blicero? Can someone recount his previous incarnation, his
appearance in (and another link to) V.? In this section, Blicero is
repeatedly referred to as "The Captain." Given that the "other"
Captain, Prentice, makes an appearance later in the episode, of what
significance is this?
In terms of narrative shift, how long ago did the events happen
that Katje recalls?
p. 94
4.) "She has posed before the mirrors too often today[...] At the
images she sees in the mirror, Katje also feels a cameraman's
pleasure[...]"
Posed before a mirror/posed before a camera/posed behind a camera:
what's the same/different about these things? This doubling trope
triggers the first major scene shift into Katje's flashback.
p. 95
5.) " 'Perhaps,' he tells her, 'I will cut your hair.' He smiles at
Gottfried. 'Perhaps I'll have him grow his.' "
Blicero's little cross-gendering, twinning game: Katje/Gottfried are
explicitly rendered as doppelgangers in the episode. What purpose
does this serve, and how does it complicate the ongoing thread of
discussions re TRP's attitudes towards women, homosexuals, etc?
(Blicero, of course, transcends all categories except Power and
Dominion.)
p. 97
6.) "Want the Change," Rilke said, "O be inspired by the Flame!"
What is "the Change" that Blicero wants -- the Change he knows Katje
will reject? Is it to be transfigured into the realm of Lord Dominus
Blicero, a realm where human life is reduced to the naked workings of
power transactions? That can't be what Rilke meant (any Rilkeans out
there?), but what else could it mean to Blicero?
7.) "[...]a British raid is the one prohibited shape of all possible
pushes from behind, into the Oven's iron and final summer. It will
come, it will, his Destiny...not that way -- but it will come...."
[ellipses TRP]
Anyone care to tackle the multiple uses of the oven/Oven/ofen? Why is
the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel invoked, either as part of Blicero's
disturbing sexual scenario, or as larger symbol? What *is* Blicero's
Destiny? A-and, there's that iron again!
p.98
8.) "Und nicht einmal sein Schritt klingt aus dem tonlosen Los..."
"And not once does his step ring from the soundless Destiny..." [all
ellipses TRP]
The twinning of the Rilke line -- translation as doppelganger?
p. 99
9.) "But every true god must be both creator and destroyer. Brought
up in a Christian ambiance, this was difficult for him to see until
his journey to the Sudwest: until his own African conquest."
Nice fat dualism here: the symmetry of creation and destruction. Why
does Blicero's Christian upbringing make this hard to see? It works
out quite nicely further on (pp. 110-111) in the scene where the
Dodo's extinction is recast in terms of Christian salvation.
p.100
10.) "Tonight he feels the potency of every word: words are only an
eye-twitch away from the things they stand for."
Yet another way to think of what delta-t might mean. Here, it's the
inexpressible gap between reality and the language that maps it, but is
this Blicero's idea of language, or the narrator's? (The p.o.v. gets
perfectly ambiguous after the colon in the sentence.) This notion
continues for rest of the paragraph: Doesn't "the face -- the mask"
have the same relationship as the word and what it stands for? Aren't
they separated by the same eye-twitch, the same delta-t? And for that
matter, getting back to a point raised in #3 above, what's the
relationship between this Blicero/Weissmann and the one last
encountered in V.? Is this Weissmann only an eye-twitch away from that
one? (Given that Weissmann's *first* appearance in GR is a
*re*appearance embeds repetition into the text in still another
dimension.)
11.) "God is creator and destroyer, sun and darkness, all sets of
opposites brought together, including black and white, male and female."
This line develops the notion of the twinning of opposed forces, and
provides, by the way, one of those moments when the text clearly seems
to be describing its own operations simultaneously with whatever else
it's referring to. (This list could have easily included "gravity"
and "rainbow," for example).
p. 100-101
12.) "Bodenplatte" "Mandala" "In Hoc Signo Vinces"
A knotting-into: An amalgam of technical and religious imagery has
been created here -- a fusing, also incorporating the Cross (see #18
below), of the preceding ideas of symmetry, repetition, opposition,
identity, divinity, etc. into visual signs. Can we say the four main
characters introduced in this episode -- Weissmann/Blicero, Gottfried,
Katje and Enzian -- also form a kind of mandala?
p. 101
13.) "How strangely opposite to the African -- a color negative,
yellow and blue."
This doubling of Gottfried into Enzian triggers the narrative shift to
Blicero's Sudwest flashback, which deals explicitly with
"mirror-metaphysics" in a pyrotechnically dense passage that follows on pp.
101-102. (From "Liebchen, this is the other half of the earth" to
"...no one, no anti-Rilke, had named.") Why is Enzian linked to these
colors?
p. 104
14.) "And she is gone. Crossed over the English lines at the salient
where the great airborne adventure lies bogged down for the winter[...]"
What is the adventure referred to here?
15.) "Or else this is her warning that--"
The classic GR (if not TRP) tease: We are brought to the edge of some
revelation and left hanging. Note that this statement seems to come
out of nowhere. The "or else" implies some logical relationship to
the previous sentence, but there doesn't seem to be any. Is Katje
doing the warning or being warned? What does "this" refer to?
p. 105
16.) "What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there's
a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange
to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War
Department. Don't forget the real business of the war is buying and
selling[...] The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many
ways."
One of the novel's great themes is expressed in a typical moment of
shtick. Note how the narrative point of view suddenly shifts from
Katje to our friend the intrusive narrator, commenting on the action.
The passage continues to the infamous "So Jews are negotiable. Every
bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars." Whatever one
makes of this passage, it is important to see it in the context of the
bitter black humor of narrative intrusion. Note, also, that the
catalyst for this intrusion is the idea of a *conversion factor* -- yet
another notion of symmetry, or doubling. Here it's lives/information.
p. 106
17.) " ' "The White Visitation" is fine' she said, and stepped into
the void...." [ellipses TRP]
Katje's statement exactly mirrors the words of cliff-jumper Reg Le
Froyd in the previous episode. What's this all about? The "tarnished
silver crown" that Katje seems to be wearing throughout this episode
may also connect her to Reg: Is Katje playing Ice Queen to Reg's Ice
King?
p. 107
18.) " 'Am I going to let the extra weight make a difference? It's my
*crotchet*, I'm indifferent to weight, or I wouldn't have brought the
girl back out, would I?' " [emphasis TRP]
This is Pirate's explanation to tripped-out Osbie for why he (Pirate)
carries an unfashionable, obsolete Mendoza instead of a Sten. Talk
about feeling the potency of every word! The word *crotchet* in this
passage hides some dizzying trails of exegetical fun.
On a structural level, Katje overhears Pirate's comment, which
triggers a p.o.v. shift back to her, and we begin to modulate into the
famous tale of her 17th century ancestor, Frans Van der Groov and the
extermination of the Dodos on Mauritius. The exact word *crotchet*
will pull us out of that scene on p.111, as we learn why Frans, like
Pirate, carries an obsolete gun (his haakbus): "...he didn't mind the
extra weight, it was *his* crotchet...." [ellipses and emphasis TRP]
This is a great example of how the mapping technique interacts with
the knottings-into.
A-and, knotting and knitting seem to be the right metaphors here,
don't they? The word *crotchet* is etymologically connected to the
word *crochet*. (According to Webster's: "needlework consisting of
the interlocking of looped stitches formed with a single thread and a
hooked needle".) The metaphor of *crotchet* to mean a fancy, conceit,
quirk, or eccentricity stems off from the idea of being *hooked* or
caught in the crotch of. And, here, *crotch* can take us to the idea
of forking, parallel branches twinned out from a central node --
reflected perfectly in the notched pole needed to support the barrel
of that heavy old "hookgun", called haakbus. This notched pole is
also the origin of *crutch* (and is etymologically related) -- though
the OED notes a mysterious obscurity in all of these words -- to
*crouch,* which might have been pointed out during the
*Crutchfield/Crouchfield* part of the GRGR. And *crotch,* *crutch*
and *crouch* are all related to *cross* -- the Ur-word underneath all
of this play -- which spins us back up into the religious and colonial
themes again, clearly a concern of the whole Mauritius
flashback/hallucination.
And as a final (by no means final -- this skein could be much further
tangled) filigree: the crotch notch fork (yet another hidden, here
inverted, arch!) should remind us of a certain letter of the alphabet
-- what else but V? -- whose shadowy presence darkly shimmers in the
episode. So when Pirate sez: "It's my crotchet" it makes perfect
sense also to hear "It's my V."
18.) "The happy couple!"
Comments about Pirate's relationship with Katje?
p. 109
19.) "There they were, the silent egg and the crazy Dutchman, and the
hookgun that linked them forever, framed, brilliantly motionless as
any Vermeer."
This tableau-like image reminds again of the idea of God as both
creator and destroyer. B-but -- why else is the tale of the Dodo
slaughter recounted?
p. 112
20.) " [...] none less than Gerhardt Von Goll, once an intimate
and still the equal of Lang, Pabst, Lubitsch."
Gerhardt, here given some cachet, is another way to remind us of
film. Any comments, by the way, on Osbie's All-Time List?
p.113
21.) "The Dutch resistance will then 'raid' this site, making a lot
of commotion, faking in tire-tracks and detailing the litter of hasty
departure."
This fake *raid,* wherein the three minutes twenty-five seconds of fake
*Schwarzkommando* film directed by Von Goll will be *discovered*, is
described exactly the way a war movie of a raid would be shot --
another comment on the relationship of film to the *reality* it
supposedly captures.
22.) " 'Indeed, as things were to develop.' writes noted film critic
Mitchell Prettyplace, 'one cannot argue much with his estimate, though
for vastly different reasons than Von Goll might have given or even
from his peculiar vantage foreseen.' "
This seemingly out-of-nowhere interjection, which occurs in this portentous
episode's penultimate paragraph, is a good example of those moments in GR
where we are suddenly warped into the future. The effect of this narrative
gambit is to distance the text from its own primary narrative line (which
steadily attenuates during the novel anyway -- tricks like this being one
way that progress is effected). This pattern of narrative helps to
destabilize the novel's chronology, forcing the question "What is the
temporal locus of this book?" This trope supports the idea that the
*present* in GR is not WW II Europe, but early 1970s USA.
Other comments about this passage? How 'bout that Prettyplace?
23.) "The camera follows as she moves deliberately nowhere [...] her
hair not bluntly Dutch at all, but secured in a modish upsweep with an
old, tarnished silver crown...."
The Mandala/circle closes as the episode ends with a repetition of its
opening words. The film, then being shot, is now being watched by
octopus Grigori as part of his conditioning regimen. Slothrop will
*rescue* Katje from Grigori's *attack* in the opening of Part 2.
Comments about this?
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