"Across the interface" (was Re: knight ridder service

[rj]

I think that Pynchon has accessed this term deliberately and
reflexively, and he uses it in a range of guises in *GR*: Walter
Rathenau, through a spirit medium, comments that the "interface between
coal and steel is coal tar" (166); Slothrop and Geli Tripping's
"Brockengespenstphanomen" is confined to "dawn's slender interface"
(331); and the Herero Pavel, sniffing "Leunagasolin", hears "the voices
of the Fungus Pygmies who breed in the tanks at the interface between
fuel and water-bottom":

Not much fun for them down here at the Interface, competing with the
bacteria who cruise by in their country of light, these cellular
aristocracy, approaching the wall of hydrocarbons each for his share of
God's abundance -- leaving their wastes, a green murmur, a divergently
unstable gabbling, a slime that grows with the days thicker, mor
epoisonous. It is a depressing bthing indeed to be a pygmy clustered
together with thousands of others, hundreds of thousands, and have to
live on the other side of all this. You say other side? What do you
mean? What other side? You mean in the gasoline? (Clustered Pygmies,
playfully and to some well-known swing riff): No-no, no no! -- You mean
in the water, then? (C.P.:) No-no, no no! ... We mean, explain the
Pygmies ... on the other side of the whole thing, the whole
bacteria-hydrocarbon-waste cycle. We can see the Interface from here.
It's a long rainbow, mostly indigo, if that's any help, indigo and Kelly
green ... (523-4)

I suspect that there is a sociological fable buried in this
hallucination.

Elsewhere there are the "souls across the interface" between life and
death (147), "floundering in the swamp between the worlds" (217). Kevin
Spectro envisaged the brain's cortex "as an interface organ, mediating
between ... Inside and Outside ... but *part of them both*" (141); and
it is Slothrop's cortex which, for Spectro and Pointy, is the
"interface" which will provide the "answer" to his apparent prescience
of the V-2 blasts (144).

I think that the notion of "interface" -- as a type of
scientifically-observable magical realm or state -- also serves as a
metaphorical demonstration of the process of information transmission
from author to reader. The text is an "interface" between the author's
experience of the "real" world and the reader's own, one across which
Pynchon reaches with his social and cultural critiques.

best


Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> Can't we credit TRP with introducing "interface" into literary discourse?
> First in a long line of information systems jargon that have taken on
> broader metaphorical use in English for "ordinary" (by that I guess this
> reporter means folks other than computer industry geeks)
> "people".