GRGR (5) PK

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

rj wrote:

> Two simply marvelous posts, ending with:

> Moreover it's immensely ironic that it is Slothrop, a
> schlemihl whose life is feasibly the measliest, who is little more than
> an instinctive creature like Vanya or Grigori and who wanders from one
> ontological situation into the next with seeming blithe acceptance and
> that same quirky irrational combination of resilience and paranoia, who
> is the character who appears to hold, if not ultimate control over, then
> the key to *all* of the text's worlds.
>
>

And Plot as conspiracy, control, and bureaucracy finds a Semantic support in the
ways in which the act of naming. chemistry, words themselves, paper, texts, and the
Rocket are symbolically associated. Following rj and Skipping way ahead to when
Saure dictates Slothrops newest identity--"Raketemensch...Names by themselves may be
empty, but the act of naming....You had the same idea? GR.P.366

Here the serendipity of naming (Saure) and the silent synchronically ("same idea")
is Magical or Ritualistic. A moment of magic, a ritual of identification that is
playful and drifts into the Fantastic. So, taking James Hillman's discussion of
epithets in The Dream and the Underworld (s~Z turned me on to this guy):

"The name gives an image and suggests a mytheme. It reveals the neighborhood, the
kinship, the function, the look and the character of divinity...The essence of the
person is in the name. Part of the name is its etymon, its hidden meaning buried in
its root."

So, Slothrop like V., and Carl Barrington in TSI (golem--mediator characters)
becomes more of an abstraction and more inanimate at the novel proceeds and the
"essence" of Slothrop begins to be present in his name.



>From A Dialogue of Self and Soul

My Soul I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
"Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul

My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought, or knower from the Known -
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.


Terrance