GRGR(16): the Wimpe factor

[rj]

Jeremy Osner wrote a very good analysis of one aspect of Pynchon's
poetry:

> >The association with Wimpe couldn't be true
> 
> A very beautiful aspect of this episode is the uncertainty over whether
> Tchitcherine really had contact with Wimpe. When Wimpe is introduced the
> verbs are subjunctive -- "Certainly he *could* have known Wimpe." "But
> Tchitcherine would have stayed." (notice the italics are gone here.)
> "How could they have failed to be observed?" Moving in a weirdly natural
> way into painting a picture of what they would have looked like *if*
> they had really been together, "Wimpe the jinni of the West holding them
> up, vial after vial, for little Tchitcherines's face to wonder at," but
> still not making any commitments -- "Was Tchitcherine there at all?"
> There is a little more putative dialogue between the hypothetical two
> and then focus moves away, to the East; when Wimpe reappears the verbs
> are declarative: "Any more than he can now connect this raw jumble of
> forty alkaloids with the cut, faceted, polished, and foiled molecules
> that salesman Wimpe showed him once upon a time, one by one, and told
> the histories of..." *But* "these are rumors. Their chronology can't be
> trusted." and we're back to uncertainty, with the fucking *amazing*
> line, "If you *are* Tchitcherine, though, well, that puts you in more of
> a peculiar position. Doesn't it."
> 

The narrative talking to the character like that is pretty disconcerting
for the reader, although we're used to it with Slothrop I think:

"If you *are* Tchitcherine, though, well, that puts you in more of a
peculiar position. Doesn't it. You have to get through the winter on
nothing but paranoid suspicions about why you're here. . . . " (349.8up)

I wonder if the "ifs" and "woulds" -- the hypothetical case -- are
simply a reflection of how careful Tchitcherine must be, and how
paranoid the Soviet bureaucracy was. Much in this sequence is filtered
through his consciousness, as have previous episodes been through the
other characters'. An outright admission of his association with Wimpe,
even to himself, could land in that dossier of his. Tchitchy's paranoia,
not only about the lumbering and all-knowing Soviet apparat but also
about the indigenous people's possible telepathic abilities and very
potential disloyalty to him, reminds me a little of that Rumanian
royalist's nightmare Pirate was channeling way back ("They try to kill
me . . . Transylvanian Magyars, they know *spells* . . . at night they
whisper." 11.4up)

The fact that Tchitcherine has become something of a drug connoisseur
himself makes me suspect that the meetings with Wimpe happened. I also
think Pynchon is showing us the inherent artificiality of that
subjunctive formulation that is used so often to argue against a
circumstantial case: if x knew y then why didn't x do z.

best