GRGR (4): the kenosa kid's confidence game.

[DudiousMax at aol.com]

Yo Dude,
               I can see where you're coming from.  IMHO the passages that 
promise epiphany but fail to deliver on the promise are not a con-job, or 
pulling us along some path for TRP's persoanl amusement: they are, rather, 
signs that the narrative is not the whole game.  Something other than "plot" 
is going on.  In L0t 49, for ex, the whole book sets up this auction where 
Oedipa, and the reader, expect to find out something that will clarify all 
that has gone before.  And just when we think we are gonna get some insight, 
the novel ends.  In GR, a lot of energy is generated by the apparent 
"show-down" between half-brothers Enzian and Tzicherine.  The narrator gets 
us to expect something cataclysmic, "The Gunfight At The O.K. Corral," or 
something.  When the two finally meet, they exchange smokes, stand around and 
chat a bit, and never realize that the other is whom they are after.  I found 
that funny the first time.  Like TRP had set up this elaborate game all 
through the book, and it fizzles out when they are face to face.  He does 
spend a bit of time/space in the text to work this out.  And at the end of 
V., Stencil does finally meet the woman he thinks of as V in Malta, but 
either he doesn't recognize her as the thing he's questing after, or he's 
just too stupid to figure her out (as Oedipa is a clueless dweeb and fails to 
get many of the clues she stumbles across).  
              So the question, to my (pardon the expression) mind, is; "Why 
is TRP doing this move over and over?"  And my tentative answer is, the 
narrative is often tapestry into which he can knot his allusions, references, 
names, half-names, ethymemes, analogies, look-alikes, sound-alikes, hidden 
histories, family secrets, secret identities, etc.  The narrative is like the 
overside of the tapestry: his tropes are like the underside of the tapestry 
(the maaswork; from the Dutch).  On the overside things happen that are often 
the referent, or the public domain of the novel: on the underside the 
literary energy is bubbling up another level of meaning.  The most rewarding 
way to read TRP, IMHO, FWIW, is like listening to jazz; we have to have the 
tune inside our heads (the overside), we have to have what the musician is 
doing at the moment (the underside), and the resultant tension of the one off 
the other, like an electronic comparator circuit, is the combined energy, and 
that is the reading I'm after.  I think that is the way GR makes most sense, 
playing the narrative off against the allusions.  So here we have Slothrop in 
some drug induced reverie, swimming down (what the Fugs, in the 60s called, 
in one song, "River of Shit.") the sewer, and begin to think about the 
shoe-shine guy, and the ambassador's kid, after mentioning Bird and Cherokee; 
and then it jumps out at us (well, me), "He's set all this up so he can get 
in the word 'assassin.'"  My mind is putty in his hands.  Certainly, in 1973 
when it was published, the unsolved assassination of JFK was still a very 
fresh idea in the public mind.  More than it is today.  And from that one 
datum, he will go on to suggest that assassination is something that we live 
with in our society, every day.
                                                                             
Max