GRGR(19): Franz, dreaming

[Jeremy Osner]

    Pökler may only be witnessing tonight -- or he may really be
    part of it.

  But what is there to be witnessed? And where? The section on pp. 410 -
413 that deals with Liebig, Kekulé and Jamf is set, maybe, in Pökler's
dreaming unconscious mind; or perhaps in the Collective Unconscious;
or... I am interested in dissecting this section to try and figure out
what's going on at certain key junctures -- if you don't find that
interesting please don't bother reading along.

  Just to get some context: in the fourth paragraph of p. 410, Franz and
Ilse are falling asleep in Franz's room. (An indeterminate number of
days have elapsed since Franz realized, on p. 409, that "Now, too late,
when he wanted to act, there was nothing to act on.") Ilse is
fantasizing out loud about what life will be like on the moon, "Earth
blue and green in the sky..." Then the section I'm talking about begins,
and it continues until, in the last paragraph of p. 413, Franz realizes
the voice he is hearing is not (dreamt) Jamf at all, but a colleague
from down the hall, waking him up. -- In between these two points we get
a marvelous panoramic fantasy world.

  But let's begin at the beginning: "Should he have told her what the
'seas' of the moon really were?" Franz is lying awake in bed, worrying
about his "daughter" -- I'm pretty sure at this point he still believes
the girl in question is his bona fide daughter. A few of his thoughts
(rationalizing the "re-education" camps) are quoted verbatim, then the
narrator's voice comes back in, describing Franz staring at the ceiling,
trying to fall asleep. There is a flight fantasy; I'm not totally clear
whether Franz's transition into sleep involves a dream of flight, or the
act of falling asleep is being compared to soaring -- is this double
reading intentional?

  But finally we're off the ground, gliding on the currents of dream...
exactly whose dream, is open to question. Because "Franz may be only
witnessing tonight -- or he may be a part of it." This line has been
causing me to stop and think every time I glance at it; I'm not sure
what to make of it. We're told this is Kekulé's (famous) dream; but how
can he, dead these 40 years, be dreaming? My first thought was, Franz is
dreaming about Kekulé's dream; but that doesn't ring quite true when I
look at the text. Nor does, "Franz is dreaming about the collective
unconscious and the assignment of dreams to different people."

  What I think has happened is, the narrator somehow got behind Franz's
mind and into the meat of the collective mind. (Quick note to the
belligerent: I am not making any assertions here pro or contra the
validity of the psychological theories of Carl Gustav Jung, about which
my ignorance surpasseth understanding, or about Pynchon's opinions in
that regard.) To me, the sections of this book which impute an
organizational/bureaucratic logic to systems where I would not have
looked for one, e.g. the skin cells or now the collective unconscious,
are magical. I would describe this section as a seance, with TRP as
medium and Franz serving as our control.

  The narrator quickly links this mystical bureaucracy with the mundane,
tying it in with the Rathenauer seance back at the end of Part I. And
it's the perfect link, because Kekulé's dream can be seen as the
starting point for IG and LSD -- we get a quick history lesson along
with some parenthetical paranoia about Maxwell's Demon.

  Let's skip ahead to the passage on p. 412 that begins, "Kekulé dreams
the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming
Serpent which surrounds the world." Such a beautiful image! The Serpent
is to be "delivered into" the System, i.e. this beautiful image is going
to be used to produce synthetic chemicals for the benefit of IG Farben,
"removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to
keep its own tiny desparate fraction showing a profit" -- an eloquent
argument for environmentalism. [ok, simplistic -- that was my response
to the passage on a gut level.]

  The bus ride that began as a metaphor for living inside the System
(like Kekulé?) acquires a more leisurely pace, and metamorphoses into a
continuation of our seance, our tour of this familiar-yet-different
universe, this "countryside whose light is forever changing". This can
happen in such a seamless fashion because our tour is a tour of "the
System" on a different level -- that is to say, the dreamer is imagining
a maniacal bus ride, which represents his life inside the System (and
here we are already moving back, into Franz's head); the narrator
meanwhile is driving and conducting our "magic bus" through the
territory of the collective unconscious, which is the System behind the
System. This is the deepest moment of the dreaming state -- the moment
when we catch a glimpse of Blicker, who authors of the narrative which
frames every other story -- we must pull back and go on with the trip.

  Getting back on the bus we find out (as if we did not already know!)
that art and images mean only, exactly, what They decide they mean. And
all at once, we are squarely back inside Franz's dream, where Jamf is
lecturing about aromatic Rings. He is asking -- and this ties the whole
experience together for me -- "who, sent, the *Dream*?"

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