GRGR(6) - section 8 (#1)

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

rj wrote:

> Terrance:
> > The war was over before the seventh Christmas. [snip] This is the third episode
> > in which Pynchon adds his  mysterious one year to the war.
> > On the very next page we have, "six years of slander,
> > ambition and hysteria..."
> >
> > Does Pynchon provide a clue with *vespers* at the church?
> > Vespers are the 6th and 7th hour. I think?
> >
> > What's curious is that Roger and Jessica have matching time
> > frames and this leads some to claim that Pynchon has a
> > problem counting. Or is there another explanation?
>
> Tim Ware's Hyperarts site has a wonderful meditation on the way that
> Pynchon indicates that Rog and Jess are "at sixes and sevens" all
> through this sequence:
>
> http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/gravity-f.html?gravity.header.html&gravity.left.html&6-7.html

Right! Now we might consider what I posted earlier.

And therefore in order to promote so useful a work, I will here take leave to
glance a few innuendoes, that may be of great assistance to those sublime spirits,
who shall be appointed to labor in a universal comment upon this wonderful
discourse. And first (note Cabalists), I have couched a very profound mystery in
the number of Os multiplied by seven, and divided by nine. Also, if a devout
brother of the Rosy Cross will pray fervently for sixty-three mornings, with a
lively faith, and then transpose certain letters and syllables according to the
prescription in the second and fifth section, they will certainly reveal into a
full receipt of the opus magnum. Lastly, whoever will be at the pains to calculate
the whole number of each letter in this treatise, and sum up the difference
exactly between the several numbers, assigning the true natural cause for every
such difference, the discoveries in the product will plentifully rewards his
labor. But then he must beware of Bythus and Sige, and he be sure not to forget
the qualities of Acamoth.

Tale of A Tub, Swift


---Come up, Yeats! Come up, you fearful jesuit!

It's quite simple, He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's
grand father and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.

Note that I changed Buck Mulligan's fearful jesuit "Kinch" (Stephen Dedalus) to "Yeats." Yeats and the
Rosy Cross. Joyce's use of names is critical to an understanding of his fiction. If we understand why he
named his character  Stephen Dedalus, we have a better chance of understanding Ulysses. The name
'Shakespeare" or "Shakes something" is equally important to an understanding of Finnegan's Wake. I will
return to this idea of naming when we get to the naming of Slothrop as "Rocket something." In any event,
it is Swift and not Joyce that is more important to the sixes and sevens.
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