Speak, Memory

[jbor]

----------
From: jporter 

> the Baudy Benny and the GR Holocaust opening are just not to my taste,
> although I accept them as someone else's).

I think it is so so much more than a matter of mere "taste". I think it is
to do with the integrity of the text and the integrity of the literary
vision. Nietzsche's philosophy was "to the taste" of the Nazis, in that it
was a selective and self-serving interpretation of Nietzsche's work which
they constructed off their own bat. Not so much "irresponsible
embellishment" as outright violation.

> The Odyssey is a horse of a different feather, however, and by its very
> nature seems to resist being lumped with those two written works.
>
> When did the Homeric epics become reduced to the certainty of the written
word?

As I understand it, with the Homeric epics all of the modern translators are
working from the same Ur-text, written in Ancient Greek and first published
in 1488. Before that there had been hand-written manuscripts dating all the
way back to a "standard edition" produced in Alexandria in the 4th or 3rd
Century BC. And prior to this there had apparently been many different
versions, but they were still *written* versions. Further, the notion of
blind Homer singing his tales extempore have largely been dismissed as
legend. As Robert Fagles says in his Introduction: "Homer, it is taken for
granted, *wrote*."

> In their original productions/performances they were purely mnemonic, were
> they not, even the invocation of a particular muse, by a particular
> author/performer, would have been a mnemonic act, no?

It seems not.

> Any possible audience irritation over which muse might have been conjured
> at a particular telling, has to be conjecture offered from the luxury of
> the age of standardized reproductions, does it not?

We're talking about lines written in Ancient Greek which actually specify
the Muse here as the *daughter* of Zeus, and which this translator has seen
fit to alter on his own initiative, apparently because he liked the sound of
the title of Nabokov's autobiography!

> If the performer invoked the daughter of memory by chanting a name, and the
> tale was well received, did the audience believe it was the muse which was
> supplying the tale, or the performer's memory?

Who knows? Surely it would differ from one listener to the next. Some people
nowadays believe soap opera characters are real.

> The invocation of Muses was, I'm speculating, not merely a convention at
> the time of the origination of the epics. If that were so, did audiences of
> the time really consider Homer to be The Author of the epics, or, just the
> best medium of the time for conveying The Myths.

I don't know if it would have been comparable to a sermon or a historical
lecture or a Celine Dion concert, or none or some or all of these together.
I don't know if "Homer" really believed that the muses were speaking through
him as a vessel as he composed (quite a few authors and poets have described
their bouts of creativity as a type of "possession"), or whether they were
simply conventions. It seems to me that the same sorts of questions about
rhetoric, conventions, sincerity et. al. apply equally to the sermon or the
lecture or the concert. Or, indeed, to a novel.

> no expert,

Nor I, but I think it is an interesting topic.

I guess your own creative interpretation of Slothrop's package being (a
simulacrum of?) Walter Benjamin's lost manuscript is a case in point here. I
mean, it was a very interesting and clever diversion, but several rather
crucial "facts" in the text needed to be set aside in order to entertain it.
For one, the contents of the package are never revealed explicitly. (To us,
at least -- but are we also justified in assuming that Slothrop has not
discovered their secrets? I think perhaps not.) Slothrop has been searching
for the S-Gerat, with increased fervour ever since he found out that what he
thought were his "human" responses since early childhood had in fact been
scientifically-induced ones. This Schwarzgerat is indeed the "black box"
which will hold the key to what he has been gradually perceiving to be his
estrangement from "humanity". Take it from there: there's enough play in
*what actually happens with Slothrop* in the text after he has retrieved
this package and perhaps become aware of its contents to keep you going I
think. Throw in the JAMF grave scene and the possibility that he's simply
been set up by one or several "sides" -- all those "lucky" escapes, and the
manner in which the package has been planted for him to discover (and at
what cost?) -- and then the self-conscious deconstruction of the fictional
character by an extra-diegetic "authorial" voice *within the text* .... It's
just that when you throw in Walter Benjamin or the Holocaust all of sudden
it becomes so unwieldy that you run the risk that you will *lose* so much of
what has been put into the text by the author; and you didn't even need to
do it because *Pynchon* hadn't thrown Walter Benjamin or the Holocaust into
(that particular part of) the mix in the first place.

Benjamin's writings, and 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction' in particular, are almost certainly relevant for Pynchon's
texts, particularly _GR_ (as, indeed, is the Holocaust). It's just that I
think you need to read *with* him and his text rather than trying to read
*against* it all the time if you're going to attempt to work out what he's
trying to say. Then, by all means, hit him with your Baudelaires and your
Benjamins and whatever other hobby-horses you *as a reader* have in order to
eulogise, criticise or deconstruct what he's on about. But at least have a
crack at what *the author's* getting at first.

best