hyperbole, ad hominem, and grits

[Dave Monroe]

Keith, everyone (well, except maybe ...), first off, pardon the
extremely partial message I just accidentally sent.  I do realize that
you are speaking directly to a few of us here, myself included, and I
soon decided to respond to a number of issues here in one fell swoop.
Sent rather than saved, is all.  Typing is not easy for me, and I'm
typically pressed for time here.  But presuming that I'm one of the
"parties involved perpetuat[ing] this odiosity," well, all apologies.
However, as tired as I am of constant little and/or not so little
sideswipes at me here by other such parties, I'm not so exhausted yet
that I'm not occasionally provoked to respond.  And, unfortunately,
having slept twice as long alst night as I have in any given day since
November, I'm particularly well-rested today, so ...

But, Keith, as I do not want to speak, remember, for anyone else here, I
suggest you ask the very venerable indeed Mr. Hollander himself why he's
gone Charlus absconditus.  I'm sure he'd be glad to tell you, and I'm
sure you know the number.  But one thing that I will remind everyone of
is that there are far more people reading than posting here, and far,
far more than those posting regularly (and no doubt even more than those
I hear from offlist), and that there seems indeed to be a "silent
majority" (pardon mon Nixonisme) who share Keith's sentiments ...

Anyway, I do not see that anyone but jbor, in an act of veritable
hermeneutic contrapposto, intended actually to associate me, or Doug,
for that matter, with Nazism, so I'll let that one go.  But I will
reiterate that Doug and Otto's reading of those opening pages of
Gravity's Rainbow as a palimpsest of possible scenarios, a particularly
strong possibility being that among the several scenes being described
(with perhaps a nigh-unto-Necker-cube perspectival flickering) is,
indeed, the "evacuation" of prisoners to a concentration camp, is a
suggestive, powerful and ingenious one ...

And do note that I referred to Charles Baudeliare's Flowers of Evil only
in passing, concentrating instead various themes in his The Painter of
Modern Life.  Benny Profane as parodic flaneur, to begin with.  This, as
I've also noted, need not have been directed specifically at
Baudelaire--though, again, note the figure of the man in black, note
that "Arcade"--inasmuch as this is as much a stock figure of modern
literature as the picaro, the fool, et al. ...

But it is one specifically, foundationally, of modernity, one taken up
and transmitted--along with the picaro et al.--across that long
twentieth century from the symbolists through the dadaist and the high
modernists and surrealists and the absurdists and the Beats to, well,
Pynchon, among many, many others.  And I'm particularly interested in
how that particular Baudelairean nexus of modernity, femininity and the
artificial emerges in V. as well.  See, again, Felicia Miller Frank. The
Mechanical Song: Women, Voice and the Artificial in Nineteenth-Century
French Narrative ...

And if I haven't been clear on this, again, apologies, but, well, it is
to say the least annoying to have to keep reiterating that neither I
nor, I believe, Doug are reading Pynchon to be claiming that those
"curves" in the "Luddite" essay "converge" ca. 1945, no before 1984,
when that essay is published.  Again (and again and again ...), I'm
reading "Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?" as to some extent a summation of
certain themes in Gravity's Rainbow.  That "convergence" is,  indeed,
deferred, indeed in 1984, indeed still deferred, beyond that "final
delta-t" at the end of Gravity's Rainbow, as it will continue to be
deferred so long as we're around to read the novel.  But "plausible" "
before too long" ... "no Apocalypse, not now," perhaps ("daeth is never
now"--Emmanuel Levinas), but perhaps not "not ever," and therein lies
that apocalyptic tone of both GR and "Luddite" ...

But, to return to those traces of Baudelaire in V., the Holocaust in GR,
what ahve you, again, archaeology, those remnants, those remains, those
fragments, those fossils, those artifacts, those fractures, those
traces, of texts, of contexts, in texts.  One thing one might learn from
Jacques Derrida is that texts are not "coherent," not totalizable
"*wholes*" (which is why I greet suggestions to the contrary with
requests for clarification); one thing one might learn from Mikhail
Bakhtin is that one word's are at best half one's own.  To suggest
otherwise seems not only "pornogrpahic" in that Pynchonian sense (again,
see Michael Berube, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers), but also not in
the least "deconstructive," not in the least "heteroglossic," not in the
least even "postmodern" as it's been largely characterized here...

And, certainly, Pynchon's texts are no more oustide the operations of
textuality than any others.  Indeed, they seem often to revel in such
operations, elements seemingly selected, intentionally or otherwise, to
maximize allusive resonance, right on down to phonemes, graphemes and
philosophemes, though not necessarily--indeed, of necessity
not--totalizing the text, but rather weaving in and out of the text
(texere, "to weave"), weaving and unweaving (again, "deconstruction" as
something a text does, rather than as something done to a text), traces,
fragments, fractures ....  Not unlike that postindustrial, postmodern
order in which it emerged  ...

An encyclopedic text not (pace Edward Mendelson?) not by virtue of
encircling a context, but, rtaher, by the virtue of precociously cycling
a context through itself?  Not by enclosure, but, in contrast, by
remaining open?  Hm ... but, yeah, keith, by all means, back to V.,
which I've been stalled in for some time now.  Again, I'm here for the
incentive ...