By any other name Geli (1)

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

By any other Name: Geli Tripping and Pynchon's doubled
children


I think Pynchon's use of names invites us to consider his
characters and the worlds they inhabit. The fictional worlds
of GR and the characters that occupy them is a subject
perhaps too broad and too complex to do any real justice too
here. However, taking Geli Tripping, and the recent
discussions of fictional characters and names, we might
consider how Geli Tripping's characterization might be
compatible with her fictional name-- Tripping, but might not
be compatible with her fictional/historical half name-Geli,
what that might mean, and if there is any support for such a
reading in GR, Pynchon's fiction in general or the tradition
upon which he draws and more specifically, the traditional
use of doubles in literature. 

I would like to speculate about the relationship between the
fantastic world of GR and the fantastic characters that
inhabit it and sort of ramble on and about what is circling
round my brain after reading the extraordinary posts here in
the last weeks. Just returned from Harvard, where while
walking from a divinity library to a science library (where
the only 5 cent per copy photo machine on campus is
located), this after reading about why castrated men were
not permitted to serve in the early church, thinking Oh God
I hope my penis doesn't freeze and fall off here, as it was
about 20 below zero  with the wind, with  my old frost
bitten big toe (surfing in the winter here can be hazardous
to your balance) and I thought how nice it would be to have
a double. A second self that might do all the dirty work,
make photo copies and brave the winds and all the other
slings and sorrows that human hearts are bare to. In any
event, if my comments are a little off balance, I can't
blame my secret sharer, but I can blame my youthful folly
and my old and cold surfer's toe. 

 GR is a fantastic world that we cannot quite grab hold of
and pin down in any way with complete satisfaction.   What
we may want, whatever YOU may want, is constantly shifting.
As readers, we almost feel as if we have quite literally
fallen down the rabbit's hole into a fictional fun house
space. Reading GR is like strapping Pynchon's kaleidoscopes
onto our mind's eye and when we look in the scopes, we often
see  ourselves inside looking out.  The world of GR, with
its 300 odd characters, is a protean world where the
fantastic, the comic, the hyper ironic, the parodic elements
of the narrative combine to subvert, sometimes abruptly,
usually exuberantly, but rarely, I think, destructively, the
realistic descriptions of the narrative. There is in GR an
ambiguous interpenetration of realistic descriptions and
fantastic elements. This is a broad oversimplification, I
know, but it is not my intention to define or even make some
sense of this intermingling, but rather, simply to note that
not only do the characters live in this world, but the
characters embody the same ambiguous interpenetration of
realistic descriptions and fantastic elements and this
embodiment is one of the most terrible beauties, one of the
most delightfully disconcerting experiences one can have
with a book of fiction.  This, as Tony Tanner, Brian McHale
and others have noted, makes the ontological status of the
figures of GR radically uncertain, although critics disagree
if this uncertainty is cause enough for the reader to
abandon "verisimilar" reading. 

A goodly example is the opening dream scene of GR (see
McHale's reading of Pirate's dream and his reconsideration
of the Modernist's influence on Pynchon's GR). 
David Morris is very apt at pointing out the parallelisms of
characters, the twisted and mirrored allusions, and the
mappings onto. Doug M often writes about the morphing
characters of Pynchon's fiction and has demonstrated how
Pynchon will move characters from novel to novel, from film
or other mediums and genres into his fantastic fictional
worlds. In recent discussions of Katje,  Pudding, and Geli,
rj gave us a wonderful example of Pynchon's shifting and
sliding repertoire of different "social" and or sexual roles
and relationships or Pynchon's love triangles and homosexual
couples. List members here often give us their own, "what
character X is to character Y is what character A is to
character B", so for example, someone might say, what Franz
is to Katje, William Slothrop is to Tyrone Slothrop and old
Tchitcherine is his to son or what the pig is to the
Puritans, the dodoes are to the Dutch, the pheasants are to
the Germans and the aardvark is to the Hereros. We find
these parallelisms all over Pynchon's fiction, they may
include material objects, like instruments for example, or
music itself. 

One of the reasons I love Pynchon is that he is such an
adept pirate. Moreover, his irony, his parody, his twisting
and turning, what s~Z calls his "pretzilizing" is more fun
than a Charles Dickens' barrel of white whales on an April
Fools day adventure into the heart of lightness. We may call
GR encyclopedic satire or whatever we like, but we are
always tentative when we play the genre game. Cognizant of
the fact that Pynchon's booty is always much more than he
plunders and that Pynchon is like Melville, Joyce and those
happy few who find that envelopes are not made to be pushed
but reconfigured. As I have argued in the past, I read
Pynchon as very traditional. In the tradition that Pynchon
draws upon we find writers that tell stories which, while
apparently comprehensible, have plots (mythos), that extend
beyond literal interpretations to mythological import and in
which characters have plausibility, but the simplicities and
complexities of their qualities do not connect plausibly to
humans; in which thoughts influence action and character,
without issuing from the reasoning processes or the
subconscious impulses of character and without appearing in
their statements; and in which the language that characters
use in conversations has no plausible literal content or
cultural origin. Melville, often uses ideas as context and
environment for the development of action in his novels;
Dostoevsky constructs in the narrative the several
dimensions in which different characters view their own
actions and those of others, as well as act; Kafka permits
characters, situations, and thoughts to emerge alike from a
dream context and sets action in frames that shift and alter
literal meanings; the structure of what men think, do, and
are develops from the intricacies of  James' involuted
prose; the history of mankind and of human thought and
language are concentrated in a few hours in Dublin by the
linguistic devices of Joyce; Sartre and Queneau permit their
characters to create their circumstances and themselves. 


Pynchon draws on all of these and many more, but what I want
to consider is the tradition of the double in literature. We
know that Pynchon makes use of the "double" in his first
story, "Morality and Mercy in Vienna," and that Dickens,
Dostoevsky, Conrad, influenced his early character
doublings. 

TBC