grgr4 Day 2

[rj]

> Only a tenth of the way with through the
> book and I'm already fucked. 

Perhaps I've gone all transmarginal myself but I'm again struck at this
point by the Flaubertian realism of the plot. Leaving aside all of the
excursus into characters' psyches, the narrative itself emulating the
swerving backwards and forwards and sidewards projections which bedevil
human consciousness, what we've got underneath it all is a pretty
standard and orderly plot chronology. 
Pirate wakes up, sees what he assumes is a V2 which turns out to be
Katje's SOS canister and which he picks up later in the day as Slothrop
watches covertly, the American Lieutenant on his last "work therapy"
(24) bomb scene visit before he's off to St Veronica's to "go under
light narcosis to help illuminate racial problems in his own country".
(75) The same evening sees Roger and Jessica assisting Pointsman in his
pseudodogcatcher guise before heading off to their illicit lovenest, and
the following a.m. Slothrop is prone beneath Spectro's (? I at first
assumed it was Pointsman but it's not, and I'm not even sure that it's
Spectro either, as his involvement in Myron Grunton's Operation Black
Wing seems dubious) syringe. Timing is precise, and Slothrop's recall to
the exact second of British Double Summer Time the moment of the first
local V2 strike (26, 29) indicates that such precision is an important
feature of the novel's 'style'.

To this point, the London characters have made their entrances in more
or less standard ways. Not only that, but I bet that some determined
cryptosurveyor could reconstruct the map of London, with Pointsman's
bedsit and St Veronica's in the East End, and Throsp's maisonette "not
far from the Chelsea Embankment" (5), the ACHTUNG offices "just off
Grosvenor Square" (17), and in so doing triangulate the exact off-limits
southern village in Surrey or Kent where Roger and Jessica steal their
furtive moments of love, finally unable any longer to tickle grinning
and malevolent Death and by so doing keep him at bay with their "love"
(60) -- maybe measure the footsteps to the exact house even. The
gasworks loom as a landmark, both from Pirate's roofgarden (6) and
Pointsman's shabby room (51). Pynchon's re-creation of London and its
environs is as precise in its way as Austen's Highbury or Hardy's
Wessex. I've got Ick Regis and 'The White Visitation' starred as
somewhere near Romney Marsh.

The plot scenes themselves are often very visual, setpieces: that
stylised view granted Slothrop of Norma and Marjorie in the Soho club,
"lined up in a row, the angle deliberately just for him, over the blue
wool shoulder of an engineman 3rd class, under the bare lovely armpit of
a lindyhopping girl" (22); or the tip of the dog's tail as it "flicks
away" from Pointsman (42); these are cinematographic cliches, Wellesian
excesses. But the intent here is still naturalistic, in a mannered way. 

Further than the 'fictive' and filmic realism of the narrative, however,
the actual people who appear or are mentioned -- Lassie and Hitler and
Malcolm X and Jack Kennedy and Bird and Ramsay MacDonald thus far -- are
not anachronisms as they would be in, say, Doctorow or Ishmael Reed or
Borges' fiction; not to mention Thayer's Slippery Elm Lozenges and Kreml
hair tonic &c. And, the psychical landscapes of the characters which the
narrative also projects -- Pirate's dream and his surrogations of
fantasy, Pointsman's megalomaniac vision, Mexico and Jessica's
mind-melded haven of love, Slothrop's banal and trivial epistolary
language puzzle daydream ("Slothrop's a faithful reader" 18) -- can, to
this reading, be seen as simply psychosomatic strategies, psychic
defence mechanisms which aspire to transcend time, the current course of
events, block out the reality of the war itself. But, if we step beyond
the margins of a naturalistic reading of this linear plot, into the
space within the contours of these surrealistic projections of
characters' sub- and unconscious minds, other realities begin to emerge,
much altered perhaps, but still identifiable even so. Architectural
follies. Novi Pazar. The Puritan tradition. Zipf. Pavlov. Poisson. The
dates and people and places and musicianship in Slothrop's sodium amatyl
recall of the Roseland ballroom &c are spot on too, as y'all have shown.
I guess this is what is meant by a 'framed narrative', or series
thereof, so I'm probably repeating someone -- sorry, I'm just thinking
out loud.

Reading the novel for the first time is like the experience of
shellshock that Spectro's patients experience. Or, that transmarginal
stage of desensitisation where you can't even be bothered seeking out
that next acronym or song lyric or biographical entry:

> By the time one has pulled one's nth victim or part of a victim 
> free of one's nth pile of rubble ... it has ceased to be that 
> personal . . . the value of n may be different for each of us, but 
> I'm sorry: sooner or later . . . (41)

But once your points of reference are established -- like the way the
listener and the other musicians have to keep the melody of the song in
their head while Bird improvises the lead breaks -- you begin to make
some headway in the other direction, towards Enlightenment, and perhaps,
sometime later on down the track, transcendence. It's tentative at best
at the moment -- the glimmers of light for Pirate and Jess and Slothrop
have all been grey and cold or dim and covered in shit, could be dawn or
a "brown dusk" after all (66) -- but maybe, just maybe ...

best