FW: GRGR(20) "Young Fool"

[jbor]

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From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: jporter <jp4321 at idt.net>
CC: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: GRGR(20) "Young Fool"
Date: Sun, Mar 12, 2000, 6:59 AM

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>From: jp4321 at idt.net (jporter)
>
> [For the purposes of this discussion, I consider synedoche to be a type of
> metonym.]
>
> It is not Berlin which is metonymic but the narrative *use* of Berlin for
> that space,

Antonomasia at least ("that Berlin"), if not metalepsis. (Although, I don't
quite get the implicit distinction you make between narrative "use" and
"mention" here, metonymic forms verging on the latter more than, or as much
as, the former I would have thought, and more so than metaphor?)

> It is not Berlin which is metonymic but the narrative *use* of Berlin for
> that space, in all its complexity, which exists beyond what appears to be
> "one big room," within which Gustav is esconced in the piano- a space
> within a space.  By G. S. Brown's _The Laws of Form_, Gustav's space and
> Berlin are equivalent. The middle ground of The Jacobstrass and its
> subdivided slums are equivalent to The Zone, in which Berlin itself is an
> historical space. The Laws of Form call for the collapse of double
> crossings into equivalency. [If you cross the same river twice, you are on
> the same side. Similarly, I could renounce my *thorny crown of roses* and
> equate a nutshell with a drop of morning dew, but I am grateful to be a
> western man, and sometimes I enjoy bad dreams.]
>
> The image of nested spaces is a figure for GR as a whole.

Ah. I see. Mise en abime (pointy hat on the i). Got it. And this
quasi-infinite paradoxical space is a space which is internalised also,
playing out in the character's tortured soul: Gustav has sought refuge
within the piano because of the "death" of art (in his terms) with the
shooting of Webern (the apparent liberator of music) by the Americans (the
apparent liberators of history), his psyche in tatters. A Modernist author
(and reading) would be *inside* Gustav's head at this point: a realist one
looking down from on high. (But what we get is both/and, not either/or.)

And so also the dialectic in the narrative between Gustav and his putative
"father", Saure, likewise playing out to infinity, or ad absurdum
(ultimately the same thing). And what we as readers're left with in that
very last space or Chinese box (because text is finite by nature, an
ultimate signifier must and does exist, choices are made by the author etc)
is something like Schrodinger's cat, or his two irresolvably potential cats
from the one actual tabby (Schrodinger's wife with rolling pin squealing):
the one (forever?) alive, the other stone dead. Thus postmodernism:
inside/outside both at once.

snip of excellent, helpful stuff -- thanks (Is the way tensor analysis is
used/mentioned in the Achtfaden episode later an example of this typifying
SCALAR coefficient?)

> Shifting from quantum metaphor to literary-magical analogy: the double
> crossing of a boundary is like experiencing the collapse of the gnostic
> double light into one source- like arriving at the origin- no matter what
> seas....

But always a meta-origin, ever elusive, no?

snip
> Also, by remaining underground,

Or, inside *his* piano.

> Also, by remaining underground, and in effect, maintaining the
> boundary between himself and the book, P. strengthens the integrity of the
> book's boundaries as an object unto itself, and by the above analysis,
> makes it even more susceptible to penetration and infection.  How many GR's
> are *out there* waiting to burst and release their chimeric offspring?

Always the possibility of a bit of lime green in with your rose, as they
say, a Jorge Haider in with your Kinky Friedman? It's an occupational
hazard, I guess, the nature of the beast.

best