" the interface" Limbo and Imipolex G

[Terrance]

MalignD at aol.com wrote:
> 
> "(b) a beam scanning system--or several--analogous to the well-known video
> electron stream, modulated with grids and deflection plates located as needed
> on the Surface (or even below the outer layer of Imipolex, down at the
> interface with What lies just beneath:  with What has been inserted or What
> has actually grown itself a skin of Imipolex G ..." (pp. 699-700)
> 
> Say what?

Well, this is a rather interesting description of the
mysterious stuff. I'm not going to type it all up. see Gr.
699-700, but the parenthetical comments on 699 are what I
will focus on here. 

...(slowly gleaming in the Void. Silver and Black.
Curvewarped reflections of stars flowing across, down the
full length of, round and round in meridians exact as the
meridians of acupuncture. What are the stars but points in
the body of God where we insert the healing needles  of our
terror and longing? Shadows...cressive moments).

Again, I'm just being lazy here, please read the entire
description on pages 699-700.

First, the  "interface"  and What lies just beneath. 

At times P's sentences don't make very much sense. Or at
least they don't make sense unless we can define some of his
terms. Obviously, (Imipolex being but one example) this is
not an easy thing to do. 

What is the "interface" and what is "the other side" and
what is "Imipolex" and what the Hell is Slothrop and where
in God's name is he? We know that the novel has many
mysteries unsolvable, inconsistencies, contradictions,
anachronisms, and so forth, like Isle and Darlene and
Imipolex G. In fact, GR is like P's first book, (part of the
problem here on this list is the fact that most members
don't care to discuss V. and P simply doesn't write enough
books ;-) ) fragmented, time and space confused, 
carnivalesque, picaresque, and it has a  tri-levelled
construction of Earth, Nether World and Olympus. 

Let's stop here. This is the genre argument, but I'm not
going to make it, all I want to address here is #3
below -the trilevelled construction. Although I'll mention
the others briefly.   

1) Carnival
2) quest-motif serves to test philosophical truths
3) the trilevelled construction of "earth," a "nether world"
   and an "olympus" 
4) dissolution or merging of identities, in particular, the
   motif of the double.
5) extraordinary freedom of philosophical invention within
   the plot
6) combination of free fantasy, symbolism and --on
   occasion--the mystical religious element with the crude
   naturalism of low life
7) the concern with ultimate philosophical positions
8) the experimental fantastically in the handling of
   perspective which can imperceptibly shift from ant's to
   bird's view
9) eccentric or scandalous behaviour--spectacular
   stomach-turning passages
10) utopian--or, to be more accurate, dystopian--elements of
    the quest motif
11) the juxtaposition of items normally distant, often in
    oxymoronic combinations
12) the parody of various genres and the mixture of prose
    and verse diction
13) the variety of styles
15) topicality and publicistic quality--WWII novel that
    illustrates ideological issues of the 1960s

Again, this is only the list, for an explanation of each,
see
Mikhail Bakhtin's *Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics* 


Now, I'm not saying that P sat down at his desk and decided
to write in this
genre? No, of course not, but it's as helpful to think that
P has written something like this as to try to define P's
books as
Modernist and more Modernist and less Modernist and more
Postmodernist and Postmodernist and Postmodernist par
excellence. And, while
Postmodernists may suggest that Malign's
need/desire/want/hope whatever it is Mr. D is greping (is
that a word?)  for, for  closure, for some explanation of
what has happened to Slothrop and what that mysterious
substance he seems to BE and be coming and
Becoming, and at times, at least, made of, is a "Dream of
annihilation," a "Modernist
reading of a Postmodernist text,"  to privilege what is ONLY
a critical and theoretical approach to texts is to seek
closure too, closure of all other approaches.  I'm not sure
that says very much in the END.  Is Slothrop the stuff that
dreams are made
on? Is Imipolex the cortex, the plastic firmament, the
screen, the wall of a now postmodernist Plato's Cave  turned
inside out and stretch across the sky?  

I don't agree with either Fowler or Cowart, but both are
useful. 


 GR is a fantastic world that we cannot quite grab hold of
and pin down in any way with complete satisfaction.   What
we may want, whatever YOU may want, is constantly shifting.
As readers, we almost feel as if we have quite literally
fallen down the rabbit's hole into a fictional fun house
space. Reading GR is like strapping Pynchon's kaleidoscopes
onto our mind's eye and when we look in the scopes, we often
see  ourselves inside looking out.  The world of GR, with
its 300 odd characters, is a protean world where the
fantastic, the comic, the hyper-ironic, the parodic elements
of the narrative combine to subvert, sometimes abruptly,
usually exuberantly, but rarely, I think, destructively, the
realistic descriptions of the narrative. There is in GR an
ambiguous interpenetration of realistic descriptions and
fantastic elements. This is a broad oversimplification, I
know, but it is not my intention to define or even make some
sense of this intermingling, but rather, simply to note that
not only do the characters live in this world, but the
characters embody the same ambiguous interpenetration of
realistic descriptions and fantastic elements and this
embodiment is one of the most terrible beauties, one of the
most delightfully disconcerting experiences one can have
with a book of fiction. This, as Tony Tanner, Brian McHale
and others have noted, makes the ontological status of the
figures of GR radically uncertain, although critics disagree
if this uncertainty is cause enough for the reader to
abandon "verisimilar" reading. 

Again, I read  Pynchon as very traditional. In the tradition
that Pynchon  draws upon we find writers that tell stories
which, while
apparently comprehensible, have plots (mythos), that extend
beyond literal interpretations to mythological import and in
which characters have plausibility, but the simplicities and
complexities of their qualities do not connect plausibly to
humans; in which thoughts influence action and character,
without issuing from the reasoning processes or the
subconscious impulses of character and without appearing in
their statements; and in which the language that characters
use in conversations has no plausible literal content or
cultural origin. Melville, often uses ideas as context and
environment for the development of action in his novels;
Dostoevsky constructs in the narrative the several
dimensions in which different characters view their own
actions and those of others, as well as act; Kafka permits
characters, situations, and thoughts to emerge alike from a
dream context and sets action in frames that shift and alter
literal meanings; the structure of what men think, do, and
are develops from the intricacies of  James' involuted
prose; the history of mankind and of human thought and
language are concentrated in a few hours in Dublin by the
linguistic devices of Joyce; Sartre and Queneau permit their
characters to create their circumstances and themselves. 


Now there is, in GR, as there is also in V.,  a
Limbo realm. The Limbo or "otherside" (not to be be confused
with the "Other Kingdom" of the "Angels"), but  "the other
side" to where many characters, including
Pudding, Spectro, Sachsa, Feldpath, Frans van der Groov,
Stephen Dodson Truck, others, have "transected" or "passed
over" is something that P picked up from his readings not 
of Postmodernism, but from his readings of traditional
literature, the tri-levelled universe is as old as Homer, if
not older, and while it is in the Bakhtin list above, #3, it
can be traced to P's sources for comparative religion, the
"other side" is from 
Scholem's Major Trends and the tri-levelled universe is from
Eliade's Sacred and Profane. In fact, I'm quite sure that
time and space (sacred and profane time and space) are so
important to P's fiction that the postmoderist secular
reading is not only a closure, it's a misreading.  

oooops gotta go to class, two hours, oh I'm sooooo boring,
and it's sooooooooo nice out, and.....but we have
sooooooooooooooooooooo much to get done. 

Keepim busy Ded. That's the ticket.