Did the sferics say anything to Mondaugen at all?

[Chris Carne]

(A de-lurk I guess -  I've just read McHoul and Willis' account (Writing 
Pynchon) of The Introduction to Slow Learner as a text just as fictional 
as the rest of the stories so you're not going to get a biography. Make
up your own it'll be at least as true as any you'd get from me.)

On first reading I took Weissmann's interpretation of the sferics as a 
kind of re-enacting of Stencil's `discovery' of the traces of V through
history. the sferics are an unstructured stimulus giving rise to a 
structured response. Mondaugan's ironic `I seem to have heard that
somewhere before.' is analogous to Eigenvalue's scepticism of the
Stencilisation of the `V texts'. 

But hang on a minute there, ace. The Tractatus wasn't published til 1922
so where exactly was that somewhere that Mondaugen had heard that before?

That boy... defeats our dumb attempts to enact closure every time.
Is it a deep and meaningful reference to Wittgenstein, is it
Weissmann's paranoia, are the sferics really telling Mondaugen something,
is it another Pynchon metaphor for the whole reading process mocking
our own search for certainties and origins?

`Is the baby smiling or is it just gas?  Which do you want it to be?'

***************************************************************************
* Chris Carne                                            No amount        *
* CALS                                                   of intelligence  *
* University of Reading                                  can ever save    *
*                                                        you from         *
* c.j.carne at reading.ac.uk                                stupidity        *
***************************************************************************





On Fri, 26 Jul 1996, Mr Craig Clark wrote:

> ...well, did they? Or is the wonderful  "GODMEANTNUURK" + 
> Wittgenstein message actually created by Weissmann (AKA Blicero, of 
> course) as a way of communicating something to Mondaugen? Maybe Vera 
> Meroving had a hand in this. And maybe we're asking the wrong questions again...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Craig Clark
> 
> "Living inside the system is like driving across
> the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
> on suicide."
>    - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"
> 
>