GRGR(18): Crossing the sea

[Jeremy Osner]

There are points in the book where the narration shifts abruptly from
the third to the second person -- this happens again, poignantly, at the
bottom of p. 389, where Pynchon, having told of a battle between the
U-boat (does he ever name it?) and the U.S.S. John E. Badass -- a battle
narrowly averted by the time-warping intervention of Oneirine -- goes on
to address the U-boat's Argentine crew directly, and disconcertingly:

    Now what sea is this you have crossed, exactly, and what sea is
    it you have plunged more than once to the bottom of, alerted, full
    of adrenaline, but caught really, buffaloed under the
    epistemologies of these threats that paranoid you so down and
    out, caught in this steel pot, softening to devitaminized mush
    inside the soup-stock of your own words, your waste submarine
    breath? It took the Dreyfus Affair to get the Zionists out and
    doing, finally: what will drive you out of your soup-kettle? Has
    it already happened? Was it tonight's attack and deliverance?
    Will you go to the Heath, and begin your settlement, and wait
    there for your Director to come?

Call me whacky but I get the feeling he's speaking to me here. Like on
one level, as a reader -- reading GR feels like sailing (or swimming)
across an ocean. And on another level, perhaps, as a member of the
Congregation -- P is preaching to me, using the sea as a metaphor for my
life thus far. I don't want to dissect that metaphor -- started to do
that mentally just now. But I am quite interested in hearing from you
all, whether you feel you are being addressed here, and in what
connection.

Two notes: The Dreyfus Affair -- that is a case in which Alfred Dreyfus,
an Jewish officer in the French army, was falsely accused of espionage
at the turn of the last century; he was later exonerated. You can read
about it on the web at http://www.albion.edu/student/jwank/eng1.htm. And
"your Director" -- that is most obviously a reference to von Göll. What
other meanings could it have?

--
Mortals are immortals, and
immortals are mortals, the one
living the other's death and
dying the other's life.

Heraclitus, quoted by Bertrand Russell
http://www.readin.com/books/westernphilosophy/