GRGR(5): Weissmann & Heidegger: being-towards-death

[Thomas Eckhardt]

>however, your post does tie into the dogs, as Pynchon's black irony is here
like that of Gunter Grass, who >has Tulla living in Harras's kennel like a
dog (how's that for a simple metaphor).

Well... It's a simile, isn't it? (Hey, you said nitpicking was cool!)

It would be nice to discuss "metaphor" at some point or other, as you
proposed. Just one garbled thought: Something that seems to become
increasingly important in 20th century literature is a device one might call
a "controlling metaphor", an image that turns up again and again, not
necessarily in the form of an actual metaphor, but also as simile, metonymy
or actual object. The rocket in GR, for example, is described as being "like
a steel banana" (8), a simile (actually the thing is more complicated if one
considers the complete sentence, but I'm digressing). Somewhere else we have
"slender church steeples poised up and down all these autumn hillsides,
white rockets about to fire" (29) where the rocket is not tenor anymore but
vehicle, this time as part of a metaphor. But common to both images is the
leitmotif of the rocket. There are countless instances of this kind of
imagery in GR until you begin, rather early in the novel, to perceive a
rocket in everything that has a similar shape - and then there's no need
anymore for actual metaphor or the like, words acquire multiple meanings.
This is a crucial feature of Pynchon's style. 

One would also have to think about what the relation of this kind of imagery
to allegory or to the so-called "epic simile" is... But I will stop here. If
anybody knows a good book about metaphor and allegory in contemporary or
postmodern writing, please let me know.

Thomas

			
                   		
		"This trucker says it's good to be free, 
		 says he knows lots of folks who agree."

		Silver Jews

 very interesting for me. Where in Johnson can I find
>> this statement?

>Sorry to blame this on my faulty memory, it might be from Johnson's
Shakespeare,
>anyone?

Thanks for providing the link to the Virginia-Woolf-page in follow-up. This
seems to be a rather common idea. If you are interested in the imagery of
trees/words/memory in contemporary writing I'd recommend Derek Walcott's
'Cul de Sac Valley' from "The Arkansas Testament".

My V. references were based upon the Picador paperback.



 
Thomas

			
                   		
		"This trucker says it's good to be free, 
		 says he knows lots of folks who agree."

		Silver Jews