vv2: "persistence of vision"

[Dave Monroe]

... well, I think I've posted on this already (on the fly, here, so
...), but ... but, while I've yet to return to V. in re: "persistence of
vision" (though thanks those who pinpointed the reference for me, and,
yeah, chapter/verse or whatever is certainly not a bad way to cite
citations here), it is certainly something significant use of which is
made in Gravity's Rainbow.

Not only those "pornographies of flight" (GR 57, Viking ed.), those
films of V-2s, but also, say, Pokler's annual visits to "his" "daughter"
at Zwolfkinder.  Calculus as well, that integration of those
infinitesimals (and recall comments about Leibniz et al. in that "Letter
to Thomas F. Hirsch" in David Seed, The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas
Pynchon).

Again, do see Michael Berube, Cultural Centers/Marginal Forces: Tolson,
Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992) on
said "pornographies," as "a regressive amnesia that creates illusory,
prelapsarian (or prelinguistic) unities through a complex mechanism of
dismemberment and reconfiguration" (p. 248).

However, y'all might be interested to know that this "persistence of
vision" thing might not necessarily be the mechanism by which said
"cinematic apparatus" (Metz, Comolli, de Lauretis, et al.) achieves said
"reality effect" (Barthes et al.).  Might not necessarily even exist.
At any rate, this has been kicking around in both perceptual and cinema
studies for a while.  A couple of papers on this in Theresa de Lauretis
and Stephen Heath, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St. Martins,
1980).  Handy online summary at
http://www.grand-illusions.com/percept.htm.

Still, "persistence of vision," er, persists as "common knowledge,"
"received wisdom," whatever, and, again, is certainly A Trope in those
Pynchonian texts.  Now, how does this figure in V. ...?