GRGR(1)

[John Boylan]

  About the opening dream sequence : it's stuctural placement at the
beginning may owe something to Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963).

  Also, there is something about the tone, the tint, of the dream that
seems genuine -- a dream that was really dreamed. We know from TRP's
foreward to Barthelme's TEACHINGS OF DON B. that TRP *did* insert dreamt
dreams in his works. Could this be one? Perhaps even the germ that led
him to write GR?

  There is in this dream sequence genuine-seeming slippage and seepage :
(1) We seem to be in London during the blitz, people are evacuating, then
(2) it seems to be a contemporary city, and the threat that people are
fleeing is a nuclear attact which (3) never lands (or I should say does
so offstage) and the city turns into a a city of the afterlife, and the
evacuating lines of people into lines of ghosts ( the afterlife -- con-
tolled by Them as well? -- has its own bureaucracy).


                                             John Boylan