scenes, cards, figues, drawings, photos ...

[Dave Monroe]

... I'm also interested in the imagery here, in imagery in general, in imagery
in Gravity's Rainbow.  Interestingly, we seem to have figures as figures, as
figurative language, images as imagery here.  A certain flattening, perhaps.
And recall the ubiquity of cinema in GR, from the films of von Goll, the various
filmic refrences (Mickey Rooney at Potsdam, even), those perhaps sprocket-joles
between the episodes, the final episode in The Orpheus Theater.  Cinema as a
simulacrum of life, of animation, even, "moving pictures," cf. Pynchon's other
animate objects, automata, V., the V-2, Vaucanson's Duck, for starters ... but
limned with death, the darkness around the screen ... I've even heard--or,
rather, read--it suggested that one might read the novel as a film of sorts, the
one perhaps which the audience (interesting term for viewers) has been awaiting
at the Orpheus, but ... but also that card, that Tarot deck, images, largely,
yet one "reads" them, makes a "reading" of them ... well, anyway, text, word,
image, again, any thoughts, anybody?  Not to mention their relation to that
perhaps scare-quoted "real" ...

jbor wrote:

>      The scene itself must be read as
>      a card: what is to come. Whatever has happened since to the figures in
>      it (roughly drawn in soiled white, army gray, spare as a sketch on a
>      ruined wall) it is preserved, though it has no name, and, like The
>      Fool, no agreed assignment in the deck. (724.19)
>
> The narrative becomes a tableau, then a coloured image on a card and then a
> faint monochromatic line drawing on a crumbling wall before it recedes away
> to nothing, to whatever the reader wishes to make of it.
>
> Slothrop is last captured in a photo with The Fool too, "an English rock
> group" (742.12 up).
>
>      One of the most important demands of The Fool is that you live life.
>      That is to say, you do not rely on book knowledge, but acquire
>      knowledge through experience of all sorts,
>
> Way I read it, the scene's close on this card is an invitation to the reader
> to put the book aside and reassess what it means to live and be human on
> this planet.