GRGR (20) Part 3, Episode 12: Summary, Questions, Comments

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

Michael Perez wrote:
> 
> QUESTIONS:
> 1.  Why are Slothrop and Greta still together?  What began as a
> “chance” meeting after his run in with Tchitcherine, has turned
> into a hellish relationship with a psychotic Lisaura, who has
> morphed into Dame Holda, the white woman.  Is she Graves’
> “White Goddess,” the archetypical mythical heroine?



What is Greta here for? Greta we told is "less than the
images of herself that survive in an indeterminate number of
release prints here and there about the Zone, and even
across the sea...." GR.364. She is a major double character. 

Doubles and Gothic in William Blake: 

G.R. Thompson designates the "high Gothic . . . [as] the
embodiment of
demonic-quest-romance, in which a lonely, self-divided hero
embarks on insane
pursuit of the Absolute . . . [which] is metaphysical,
mythic, and religious,
defining the hero's dark or equivocal relationship to the
universe" (2). Thus,
Thompson here identifies the three most common archetypal
Gothic motifs which
assume various forms in literature: narcissism or
self-isolation, the Doppelganger
(a doubled or divided self), and the quest. The alienated
protagonist usually rejects
some aspect of society, and his "insane pursuit" implies
that he, too, will be
somehow rejected.

http://prometheus.cc.emory.edu/panels/1c/randonis.html

Book Review 

Gordon E. Slethaug. The Play of the Double in Postmodern
American Fiction.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. ix + 235 pp. $34.95
cloth. 

The double is no longer a character, an uncanny but
sometimes angelic twin to the protagonist or a sinister
shadow embodying repressed and unacceptable impulses.
Slethaug leaves behind the Freudian and Jungian symbol, and
even various versions of The Other, all of them
personifications. The double here becomes the applicable
term for any sort of doubling, binarism, repetition (with
inevitable variation), reinscription--in short, all forms of
such limited multiplication. Slethaug seemed at first to be
ruining a useful literary term by broadening it too far, but
his point is that postmodern writers are deliberately
extending and negating the conventional double. Traditional
authors employed the image of a person as double to affirm
the
humanist concept of a stable self and unified culture. The
double temporarily split off and manifested itself as a
separate entity in order to be dealt with: integrated, or
killed, or joined on a higher plane of reality. The power of
the image was so great precisely because it threatened our
sense of unified self, and we could feel reassured when that
rebel fragment was subsumed or destroyed, and unity
reasserted. Postmodern ideologies deny the unitary self,
coherent reality, and the meaningfulness of character as an
element in fiction; to come to terms with the tradition,
current authors must absorb and rework it in this new image.
[End Page 859]   Slethaug deals with Nabokov's Despair,
Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Hawkes's Blood Oranges, Barth's
Lost in the Funhouse, Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster, and
Federman's Double or Nothing. Nabokov's aims are presented
as being very directly the interrogation of the
double tradition. Despair is not "another
rationalist-humanist iteration of a metaphysical contest
between good and evil, of Freudian decomposition, or of
Jungian psychological imbalance" although it has been read
in those fashions. It is the "carnivalized play of the
double" through the deliberate creation of a false double.
Pynchon is credited with altering the function of the double
in literature when he affirms binary intersubjectivity. The
full breadth of what Slethaug embraces
under the double shows when he adopts every binary
opposition ever noted in that novel. Slothrop overlaps and
echoes such characters as Tchitcherine and Enzian in a
fashion called (by Brian McHale) "mapping on to them". To
this generally recognized quasi-doubling, Slethaug adds
affinities with Greta Erdmann, Roger Mexico and Jessica
Swanlake, Geli Tripping, Edward Pointsman, Ernest Pudding,
Katje Borgesius, Blicero, Byron the Bulb, and Franz Pokler
as cases of extended doubling. But why stop there? Pig
Bodine, Gerhardt von Goll, indeed virtually all the
characters share some experience or characteristic with
Slothrop. Does drinking the same drink ensure a meaningful
connection, let alone doubling? Is this whole sale doubling
as useful to our reading the text as McHale's study of how
characters map onto each other? Slethaug's reading makes
Pynchon obsessed with destroying our concept of the stable
or unitary double. While Pynchon seems to me to have more
important obsessions, Slet-haug makes a good argument for
this concern with doubling if doubling is defined as
including binary oppositions.   Hawkes's forms of doubling
are linked to those of Lacan. Barth uses doubles in all the
fashions of Nabokov, Pynchon, and Hawkes, and in addition,
he designifies society, culture and history every time he
designifies the double. With Brautigan, the double leads us,
among other things, into interrogation of our culture's
narcissism. Via the double, Federman turns literature and
life into games. In many ways, I found the book more
interesting as a discussion of postmodernism through the
lens of this one literary device than as an analysis of the
device, but its readings are helpful either way. Brautigan
is difficult to talk about coherently, but Slethaug manages
with sparkle. In both that chapter and the one on Hawkes,
the original texts come through vividly; this is less true
[End Page 860] for Pynchon and Nabokov, where I kept
pleading for more illustrations for Slethaug's assertions.
The introductory chapter on the traditional and postmodern
double takes the reader through Plato, Freud and his
epigones, Jung, Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida. This sequence
stresses the postmodern play of signifiers characteristic of
this literature. Slethaug makes plain that Freudian or
Jungian readings of doubles in postmodern literature lack
appropriateness to the as sumptions of the literature. Only
by changing our concept of the double can we make sense of
what such authors are
doing.                                                             

 KATHRYN HUME, The Pennsylvania State University 
 
Turning back to GR.281. On the first page of the first
episode  "In the Zone" we learn that Slothrop's shoes have
been lifted by a DP and that a red tulip was left between
Slothrop's toes and that "He has taken it for a sign. A
reminder of Katje." And that  "Signs will find him here in
the Zone, and ancestors will reassert themselves. It's like
going to that Darkest Africa to study the natives there, and
finding their quaint superstitions taking you over
. Signs
of Katje, and doubles too." 

Turning back to the chapter we find that Pynchon sets up and
a great deal (including Jim Fisk) of what he develops in the
Zone section-the "doubles" too-and these are woven back and
forward along the narrative-textually and subtextually.
Pynchon needs a woman here. A figure that maps onto several
of the female characters, myths, allusions, and the shifting
S&M dynamic. At first, we have a cute meet that reminds me
of Roger and Jessica. Slothrop lights the fire and Greta
lights the lamp and cooks, they fuck each other to sleep
without  paraphernalia or talk. "Great," said my selfish and
randy masculine side. But when Slothrop wakes up all is
changed.  "Slothrop and the S-Gerat and the Jamf/Imipolex
mystery have grown to be strangers." More important perhaps,
is that Slothrop is sliding into "ani-paranoia" "where
nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us
can bear for long." 

In general, allusions in GR are cryptic and are usually
adapted idiosyncratically and here, with the white woman and
Greta's merging/mapping doublings, we find references to
Merkabah mysticism, the book of Zohar, Lurianic Kabbalah,
Sabati Zavi's Messianic movement, Venus, and Tannhauser's
Lisaura. Kabbalah, at certain times in history, was
compounded with a medley of non-Jewish conceptions
(including popular christian notions) ranging from Tarot
cards to the Trinity, and Pynchon as is his bent, mixes and
distorts allusions to serve his narrative purposes, i.e..
the Yew Tree.