Chasing ... Cutting

[jbor]

Actually, it's a suggestion millison made near the beginning of the current
*GR* reread, also.

I'll try to dig up the relevant posts from the archives later on. It
certainly makes that taunting voice which says "You didn't really believe
you'd be saved ... " quite a monstrous feat of imagination on Pynchon's
part.

best

----------
>From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
>To: Otto Sell <o.sell at telda.net>
>Subject: Re: Chasing ... Cutting
>Date: Tue, Aug 29, 2000, 7:51 AM
>

> ... well, whoever's going to go through all these posts for Professor Krafft,
> might I nominate Otto's here (see below, at LEAST)?  This might the single
most
> interesting observation I've seen about Gravity's Rainbow, period, and he's
> apparently been sitting on it since 1982.  The entire post is, of course, of
> interest, and excellently observed (that "destiny" thing, for starters, which
> certainly resonates with that Protestant predestination thing as well).  But
> what's the line in GR about "worlds laid on worlds" or whatever?  Palimpsests,
> indeed, here.  Every time I read GR (for starters, but esp. given its ending),
I
> always wonder, how would you film this?  As noted earlier, can well imagine
the
> often strange-to-absurd-to-farcical narrative filmed, insofar as it can be,
> "straight," with all sorts of subtexts (esp. those real-historical ones)
> montaged, flickering, morphing, in and out of the background.  A la the image
> Otto indelibly leaves us--or, at any rate, me--with here.  And i was just
going
> to say a little something about those rockets, those theaters, those sounds
> (screaming, sirens) at the beginning and end of the novel ... well, my neurons
> are firing afresh now, thank you Very Much Indeed, Otto ...
>
> Otto Sell wrote:
>
> The margin in my *Die Enden der Parabel* has a note from 1982:  "Auschwitz
>
>> ?" - I see the first mentioning of the Holocaust on p. 3-4 in Pirate's
>> dream, dreamily disguised as London-evacuation. The images that come up are
>> of deported Jews. Remember Pirate's special talent explained in Episode Two.
>> This is what millions of Jews encountered at "die Rampe," at the real "oven"
>> at Auschwitz, where the final selection, the final judgment without appeal
>> took place:
>>
>> "(...) places whose *names he has never heard* . . . (...)" (3. italics by
>> TRP)
>> "(...) they are under the final arch: brakes grab and spring terribly. It is
>> a judgment from which there is no appeal.
>> The caravan has halted. It is the end of the line. All the evacuees are
>> ordered out. They move slowly, but without resistance. Those marshaling them
>> wear cockades the color of lead, and do not speak. It is some vast, very old
>> and dark hotel, an iron extension of the track and switchery by which they
>> have come here. (...) . . .  the evacuees are taken in lots, by elevator--a
>> moving wood scaffold open on all sides (...)." (4)
>>
>> The double-meaning of *scaffold" should alarm every reader at once.
>>
>> Otto
>