GRGR(5) Katje: in close up

[rj]

Justin Ginnetti wrote:
> 
> Well,
> Let's keep the other threads going but keep on moving.  Taking it from
> the top, the camera tracking of Katje suggests Laura Mulvey's critique of
> cinema in her 1975 essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."  TRP
> anticipates Mulvey of course, but there are a number of striking
> similarities.  Firstly, the perspective adopts that of the camera (or at
> least incorporates that of the camera/cameraman); this recalls Mulvey's
> notion of male voyeurism inherent in film, a voyeurism which relies on
> the enfetishization of the female body ("the camera follows as she moves
> deliberately nowhere longlegged about the rooms, an adolsecent wideness
> and hunching to the shoulders. . ." (92.23-25)).  At the same time this
> position is disrupted by a) the acknowledgement of the camera (by
> mentioning the camera the narrator is most likely not the camera or
> cameraman) and b) Katje herself.  Katje--and this might be an appropriate
> time to begin a full-fledged discussion of her--is obvioulsy much more
> than the object of the male gaze.  In this scene alone she seems more
> like a male "flaneur" than a feminine sex object.  Anyhow, just a start.

I think Pynchon's having a bit of a nod and a wink here at the cinematic
style he's appropriated for many of the sequences in the novel. So often
does a section open with a present tense tableau:

Teddy Bloat's on his lunch hour ... (17)
Wind has shifted around to the southwest ... (20)
On the wall, ... a gas jet burns ... (29)
They're bound eastward now, Roger ... hunched Dracula-style inside his
Burberry ... (37)
Inside St Veronica's Hospital they sit together ... (47)

Later these will simply become clipped sentence fragments which emulate
stage or scene directions even more closely:

Just before dawn. (329)
A windy night. (591)
It's a bridge over a stream. (733)

Or, even more overtly, a cut to a new scene:

Back to Berlin, with a terrific thunderstorm blowing ... (433)
Here is the good Frau, leaning over Slothrop from way down at the foot
of the bed ... (525)
Here's Enzian ramrodding his brand new rocket through the night. (724)

By sticking to the present tense like this (note the frequency of
adverbs like "now" in these and other similar openings, the exaggerated
particularisation of gesture and setting, the use of present participle
denoting action-in-progress) Pynchon is able to engineer a cinematic
instantaneity to each new episode.

I have a suspicion, which I floated once before, that Pynchon might have
spent some of his California/Tijuana sojourn writing for the movies
(c.f. stationery from one of the major movie houses which Pynchon
scrawled a letter on at some stage, I think cited at Tim Ware's site) --
for tv even perhaps (the premise and concept proposal for something like
the original Fantasy Island, for example) -- but I also wonder whether
some of the sections of _GR_ were perhaps also originally/tentatively
being articulated for film. Mere speculation, of course.

This aside, in this episode introducing Katje the camera is
self-consciously there as part of the scene, as Justin points out. (So,
in terms of narrative pov, there's a second camera somewhere ... On the
grassy knoll perhaps?) But, it's another frame-breaking moment, for
sure, a baring of structure, admission of artifice, ontological
displacement. Or so it seems -- until later on that is, when the reader
cottons on that the first camera *is* part of the plot as well. The film
is actually playing in a loop, for the octopus no less, and what we have
witnessed is not Katje but the film of Katje, and the thoughts Katje and
Osbie were thinking as she was being filmed (though, both miraculously
and confoundingly, these are being conveyed in the cinematic present
tense as well). Again, the reader is being buffeted back and forth
between worlds. 'Real' significance is retrospective here, once more.
And, by which time it has hit the other possibilities have already been
countenanced, and have registered. It is not until the end of the
section, for instance, that we understand why she is moving
*"deliberately nowhere"*, that she isn't just a dolled-up glam queen (in
saying she's a "male flaneur" do you mean she's like a drag queen? sure,
the tarnished tiara's a bit overdone for a date with an octopus, I
suppose, but ... if it is so it certainly throws new light on Slothrop's
tastes, or what his tastes are perceived by El Pointo to be) floating
about and practicing her coquettish strut, that there is indeed method
in this madness. She is moving "deliberately nowhere" in precisley the
same manner (and attire, I think) that she will be moving "deliberately
nowhere" on the beach with Slothrop when the Pointer unleashes Grigori.

But what I think Pynchon is also showing us here is how the literary
medium is able to transcend the filmic. Look at the parenthetic
description which closes the introduction of Katje into the narrative, a
description directed to the reader rather than Osbie, I'd suggest:

(In close-up her skin, though nearly perfect, is seen to be lightly
powdered and rouged, the eyelashes a touch darkened, brows reshaped a
matter of two or three empty follicles. . . .) 93

Katje wears makeup. She has plucked her eyebrows and darkened her
lashes. This information, even in extreme close-up, would not be
apparent on a celluloid frame, and would be unobserved by a cinemagoer.
Now, I think these exclusively literary details have been included for a
reason. That she wears makeup at all (to a stereotypically chauvinistic
way of thinking, no doubt) signifies narcissism, vanity perhaps (but
maybe not so in Katje's case), but that it is as subtle as this
signifies subterfuge and deceit (for me at least). This is the first
hint that Katje is double-dealing, that appearances, and *her*
appearance, are not what they seem.

More than this I think, Pynchon is moved to vindicate the literary
medium, to assert its independence and the subtlety of its range, a
display of the sophistications available to textuality which cannot be
emulated in film. In this literary aside the betrayal of Katje's
essential duplicity *"is seen to be"* -- the passive verb tense really
does it for me here, because in a film it so emphatically *would not* be
"seen to be" at all. The narrative's declaration is quite a pointed one.

It's just "a matter of two or three empty follicles", but it lets me
know that this bitch, she cain't be trusted, nossirree.

best