GRGR(4) - Surreality (was Slothrop's Rape)

[Doug Millison]

At 1:14 PM -0400 6/18/99, davemarc wrote:
[snip]
>It's beneficial to scrutinize GR for all sorts of intentional, conscious
>allusions, but I think it'd be doing a disservice to the book to disregard
>the possibility (in my mind, the probability) that portions of it might
>have been created through surrealist techniques like automatic writing,
>trance writing, and the transcription of dreams and hallucinations.

I think this is a very good point, especially in light of TRP's comments,
in his Sloth essay:
"But Sloth's offspring, though bad -- to paraphrase the Shangri-Las -- are
not always evil, for example what Aquinas terms Uneasiness of the Mind, or
"rushing after various things without rhyme or reason," which, "if it
pertains to the imaginative power . . . is called curiosity." It is of
course precisely in such episodes of mental traveling that writers are
known to do good work, sometimes even their best, solving formal problems,
getting advice from Beyond, having hypnagogic adventures that with luck can
be recovered later on. Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do."

The whole toilet trip and toilet land beyond resemble a Surrealist
landscape, something from a Salvador Dali painting, perhaps. And it
possesses the pared-down quality of a dream -- strange logic, peppered with
odd details.

d o u g  m i l l i s o n  http://www.online-journalist.com