vv2

[jbor]

I would imagine that the joke itself precedes Melville too, and that Pip's
allusion is perhaps one and the same; except that Pynchon felt a need to
spell the joke out in full. The High/low, fiction/non, history/myth
combinations, with a dollop of cybernetics (prosthetics, at the *very*
least) are also relevant to *Moby Dick* as well, I'd venture.

----------
>From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: vv2
>Date: Wed, Oct 18, 2000, 6:20 AM
>

> In re: Moby Dick, Ch. 99, "The Doubloon," in re: V., Ch. 1,v, "the
> golden screw," yes, indeedy.   Doubleplusgood annotation there, jbor.
> Interestingly, though, that joke about the screw and the navel and the,
> er, ass, was apparently in circulation (well?) before V., which I take
> as another example of what I've been referring to here as "signal bleed"
> between channels of reference, of referents, something which I've also
> been taking as a particular, if not necessarily peculiar (sort of a
> general characteristic of literary, poetic language, I'd venture, but,
> Derridean that I be, I take such "bleed," such dissemintaion as sort of
> the general condition of language) characteristic of Pynchon's texts.
> That way of pointedly alluding to a number of possibilities all at
> once.  So we've got, what, high lit'rature, low humor, and, perhaps,
> that onset of the cybernetic age (prosthetics, prostheses, indeed,
> reminds me, David Wills, Prosthesis) ...