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

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Thomas Eckhardt wrote:

> 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.

If you can come up with a way to focus such a discussion--- I don't want to
select a book or article but you can---I will participate. Discussing the rocket
as controlling metaphor may not be much different than current discussions.

Anyone read: Pinsker, Sanford. Title: The schlemiel as metaphor, Carbondale :
Southern Illinois University Press, c1991.

Terrance