V.V. (6) Argonne Experimental Facility

[Dave Monroe]

Apology accepted.  That AEF @ p. 102 no doubt refers immediately to that
American Expeditionary Force, but, of course, deconstructionist,
insomniac and/or paranoiac that I am, I'm always up for some free
association.  And that's what I appreciate in particular about Charles
Hollander's commentaries, their meticulous and tenacious pursuit of all
those interesting associations, filiations, disseminations, even, that,
whether or not Pynchon intended them (though I suspect he more often
than not did ...), are certainly suggestive, productive, and, of course,
fair game.  And there is undoubtedly much of the unconscious that ends
up on the printed page as well (from the inner mind to ...).  My only
quibble with CH is that he has a tendency to foreclose other
interesting, applicable possibilities which he seems to see as
irrelevant to his immediate readings.  But invaluable research and
compelling interpretation thereof nonetheless, among the most
interesting and useful pieces of Pynchoniana I've been fortunate enough
to have cross my path ...

But on the particular filiations, disseminations of that acronym, taking
up the Argonne angle, "the battle of Meuse-Argonne," "the Argonne
plateau" (p. 99), that Argonne National Laboratory (http://www.anl.gov/)
which no doubt would have been known and of interest to a Pynchon of
virtually any age--a network TV special on the lab aired in 1960, even
(http://www.anl.gov/OPA/history/sixties.html)--and which certainly
resonates with not only the irradiated SHROUD but with Pynchon's avowed
concerns with that "arc" from Hiroshima ("Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?")
...

But, hey, while we're at it, keep going, note that the elemont, argon
(Ar), is not only an inert gas (i.e, it will not react, not easily, at
any rate, with other elements, e.g., oxygen, hence it is not
combustible), but that its very name means "inert," "lazy," "Gk, neut.
of argos idle, lazy, f. a- + ergon work; fr. its relative inertness," it
sez here in the Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary I have at hand, "a
colorless odorless gaseous element found in the air and in volcanic
gases and used esp. as a filler for electric bulbs and electron tubes"
(!) ... immediately below, argonaut, taken generically, "an adventurer
engaged in a quest," but note also of course the specifically naval
reference, not only that "naut," but the good ship Argo ... and shortly
thereafter, argot, "an often more or less secret vocabulary and idiom
peculiar to a particular group" ... or, reinstating that terminal
consonant and reversing direction one might well find one's way, via
argent, "archaic: the metal silver," to argentine, and, thus, The
Argentine, Argentina, which, like the inert, the lazy, electric bulbs,
electron tubes, adventurers, quests, secret vocabularies, idioms,
particular, not to mention peculiar, groups, has, as you've emphasized
here, no small place in Pynchon's particular, peculiar idiom, secret
vocabulary as well ...

If only I had the time and tenacity to work in those Argand diagrams ("a
conventional diagram in which the complex number x + iy is represented
by the point whose rectangular coordinates are x and y") other than to
note that they would involve an essentially Cartesian (and/or
Leibnizian, though Leibniz's system was haptic rather than optic)
coordinate system in which the imaginary element, that "square root of
-1" (i.e., i), is perhaps "pornographically" (in the Pynchonian sense)
"remaindered" (in the Derridean sense) out of the mapping (in whatever
sense) ...

But as we've also been talking Schoenmaker, Esther, rhinoplasty,
allografts, plastic surgery in general (albeit not the Surgeon General),
a couple of recent texts that I've not quite managed to open but might
well be of interest ...

Gilman, Sander L.  Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History
    of Aesthetic Surgery.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999.

Haiken, Elizabeth.  Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery.
    Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.

... which I picked up following up on a friend's enthusiasm about
something he saw on PBS suggesting a sort of cosmetics nationalism in
France after WWI, in which maimed soldiers were given prosthetics,
masks, allografts, what have you, as a sort of propaganditic denial of
the horrors wrought upon the French even in eventual victory.  Hm ...
Schoenmaker, "received his impetus--like the racket itself--from the
World War," "certain of the faces [...] never came back" (V., p. 97).
Reminds me as well ...

Wills, David.  Prosthesis.  Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995.

David Wills, of course, co-authored (with Alec McHoul) Writing Pynchon:
Strategies in Fictional Analysis (Urbana: U of Illlinos P, 1990).
Interview @

http://mdr.aletheia.be/crossings/interview.htm

But if anybody knows what PBS show that was, please let me know ...