By any other name Geli (3)

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Doublings and Twins are ubiquitous figures in history,
story, myth, film, fable, and so on, that it seems almost
futile to attempt to discover Pynchon's sources. Why just
the other day I went to the movies to see  "The Sixth Sense"
after reading the first few chapters of Wally Lamb's "I Know
This Much Is True." Both the film and the novel are
variations on the age old doubles or twins story. However, I
think we can say that Conrad, Dostevsky, Dickens, and Joyce
are major influences on Pynchon's doublings.  Before I give
my own ideas on this and try to discover how Geli Tripping
and Geli Raubal fit together, if in fact they do, and I am
still skeptical of this, I think I will try to give a brief
account of some of the double stuffs we find in GR and what
some of the smart professionals have to say about them. 


McHale directs us to GR.218 to explain how in GR "mapping"
is mimetically motivated, and he takes up Geli Tripping:

"Or, finally, consider the even more bizarre transition from
Geli Tripping, the witch, to Gottfried, Captain Blicero's
catamite, very late in the novel (GR:720-1). 

 How bizarre, How bizarre.  

The "doubling" of characters in GR is extremely complicated.
There are several noteworthy critical studies on this topic,
including Brian McHale's Constructing Postmodernism, see
Part II, "(Mis) reading Pynchon," specifically, "Mediums of
transition" and  "Mapping" and Hohmann's application of Putz
in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow: A study of its
conceptual structure and of Rilke's influence.  Tanner,
Slade, Levine, Fowler, Strehle, Kaufman, and many others
have investigated the complex "doublings" in GR and other
Pynchon works. 

 
Pynchon's use of doubles, as is the case with much of his
(ab)use of traditional narrative techniques and subjects,
confounds and overwhelms the reader. What Pynchon has to
say, "Oh Rocks," he never tells us in plain words. In his
fiction we are treated to so many multilateral allusion,
that it seems safe to say that Joyce's bombastic declaration
that what he put into Ulysses would  "keep scholars arguing
for centuries" may also apply to what Pynchon put into GR. I
guess Pynchon could have given Driblette the "half-name" Jay
Jay or something. Pynchon's doubles are further complicated
by his narrators and how these narrators engage the reader.
Doubles are sometimes triples or multiples and often involve
other multiplying techniques, for example, the use of
mirrors, of voyeurism and dreams in V.. The narrators of GR
are now notorious for their playful overabundances, 
paranoid extremes, incessant ironies, and compounded
parodies.  In GR, as Tanner and McHale have demonstrated,
the concurrent "real" and fantastic scenes--drug
epistemologies, mediumships, permeable boundaries of wake
and sleep, inside and outside, the world and the world
beyond, etc.-- are not simply the worlds that the characters
in GR inhabit, but are more often than not the worlds they
embody. Pynchon's subversive comedy, his "analogical
patterning," his mind to mind transitions and his mapping
-"any character in this novel can be analogically related to
almost any other character
" (McHale, C.P.80), are
delightful disconcerting, bafflingly beautiful, and doubly
doubling--Pynchon reduplicates character relationships or
maps onto a variety of a stock  repertoires.

Many of Pynchon's characters are "flat" or stock figures.
Now, I know this is a bit controversial and that's OK, I'm
not using the term "flat" as it has been used as a charge
against novelists that fail to impart "roundness" or
humanity to their characters, but we need to consider the
fact that Hollander's approach (I think he  cites Frye's
Anatomy) is part of a comprehensive genre approach that
identifies GR as  Menippean Satire. Again, the genre game is
also controversial, but not so controversial that several
critics, very often in response to Mendelson's (Hollander
may have been a student of Mendelson's?) extraordinary
Gravity's Encyclopedia, agree, with some minor distinctions
or subtle qualifications, with Hollander's 1978 claim. 


How these stock characters are mapped onto each other, how
the love triangles, the homosexual couples function in GR is
taken up by Hohmann in his superb study of GR and Rilke. I'm
still putting that Rilke and Blicero stuff together and will
post it when appropriate. 

A short digression on Pynchon's "Grotesque
Post-Dickensian/Joycean Names:  

First Joyce, then Dickens:


Critics are not certain why Pynchon named the  "protagonist"
of GR, Tyrone Slothrop. Lots of suggestions, Slothrop is
some play on the second law of thermo-dynamics and so on,
but as far as I know, we can't say for sure. Why Tyrone?
Growing up as I did, in a black neighborhood, Tyrone is
black man's name. Being Irish, Tyrone is also an Irish
place. So,  is Tyrone Black Irish? I doubt it. Tyrone in the
baby books is "young soldier." So it goes
. It is
interesting though, that Pynchon turns to Joyce in his first
story--MMV--and double plays with Joyce's Stephen. 

Why did Joyce call hero Stephen "Dedalus"? In his biography
of Joyce, Richard Ellmann claims: 

To suggest the Christian and pagan elements in his mind,
even to the point of absurdity, Joyce called himself Stephen
Daedalus (then, to make it a little less improbable, Stephen
Dedalus) after Christianity's first martyr and paganism's
greatest inventor. Stephen would be a saint of literature,
and like Dedalus would invent wings to soar beyond his
compatriots, and a labyrinth, a mysterious art based on
great cunning.
 
I turn now to Joyce's FW and the name Shakespeare and
Vincent Cheng's "Shakespeare and Joyce: A Study of Finnegans
Wake."

'Cheng's study provides a useful catalogue of the ways in
which
the Wake incorporates fragments from the Shakespeare text.
It classifies them as quotations and allusions which fit
into four categories: "variants on the name of Shakespeare";
"variants on the titles of Shakespearean plays"; "other
quotations, parodies and allusions"; and "indirect,
lesser-known, and less obvious echoes and quotations from
the plays." Joyce's "elusive" methods: "Shakespearean
allusions in the Wake," he states, "are not bright apples
hanging from low boughs, ripe for easy plucking." "Joyce's
methods are often obscure and elusive." Because the Wake
often "(con)fuses" different signifiers together in order to
produce what Cheng terms a "multiplex allusion," or a
"conflation of many allusions," contextualization of the
Wake's re-marking of fragments from Shakespeare's works can
be accomplished only by suspending those parts of the
"multiplex allusions" which do not signify the Shakespeare
text. The proper name, 'Shakespeare,' for example, is
inscribed in the Wake through a disseminative play of
différance. The proper name is solicited, in the
deconstructive sense of "shaken" (from the L. "sollus whole,
entire + citus, ciere to put in motion" [OED} cf. sollicito,
"to disturb, stir, agitate, move . . . to stir, put in
lively motion, move violently," [Lewis and Short]) and then
disseminatively scattered or spilt throughout the text.
"Shakespill" thus operates not only as a trigger to set the
Shakespeare-Joyce intertext in motion, but also as a
signifier of the techniques by which the proper name is
erased on order that the practice of writing signified by
the sign "Joyce" can take place. Contextualizing
"Shakespill" by treating it as an allusion to Shakespeare,
or a variation on that name, entails setting aside its
signification of the very writing practice by which the
originary proper name experiences the "fall" and "expulsion
into the exteriority of the sensible here below" in favour
of attempting a historical reconstruction that might invest
"Shakespeare" with something of its historical
signification.' 

TBC