Holocaust as metaphor? (is also Re: answering jody

[jporter]

> From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
> Organization: Milwaukee Public Museum
> Date: Sun, 07 Jan 2001 20:28:31 -0600
>
> .... aw, hell, these days I've been looking for the ugliness first, so
> pardon me for not mentioning this most excellent post of yrs, Jody.
> Esp., to my astrophysical eye, the lead/iron bit.  A question, though.
> Not having Gravity's Rainbow at hand, is it ever even absolutely clear
> that that opening bit IS Pirate's dream?

I'll schtick by my "It seems..." with the emphasis on seems. Corroborating
circumstantial evidence would be Pirate's penchant for that which pregnant
Esther would prefer not to have to deal with- that is, ESP. (Although now
that I think of it, Esther's "I am late" at the end of her crosstown bus
trip does reverberate with the "It's Too Late" of the GR opening.. possibly
bringing in a whole load of illusions here, including Pirate's adenoidal
"Nose Schtick" and integrating that with the abortion which may result from
Esther's lateness... but I might be mistaken for covorting with those
Archon's. Still, it may be important, especially for some, to decide whether
or not we are dealing with an Authorless Dream here, especially if
interpretation is paramount. I.e, not only who might be having the dream,
but who might be producing it.)

So, I would aver, nothing is absolutely clear, except low puns, and perhaps
some panes made sugary. If we consider the two competing dream states to be
equivalent except in the opposing spins I will give them, there is a choice,
but each seems to be hung on a gallows of its own design (cf. M&D, ch. 11
and my double slit in the Western Wall take), i.e., is it really a free
choice?  The dream is an enigma to me, but I suspect the work of gnostic
priests operating through the pliant Prentice, to warn us. Orthogonally, it
might be the work of the Archons. There is that, half-silvered glass, you
know, so maybe we can separate the two, as if they were two aspects of the
same quantum wave. Knowing very little about Gnosticism, however, I am
unqualified to make that determination, other than to pose the querie- based
on the conditional nature of the scene- will the dream be aborted, or, is
the abortion the dream? I suspect both. Simultaneously.

[Forgive me, I've been reading Dali and attempting to imitate his
"critical-paranoiac method."]

>Having just scored my own copy
> of David Cowart's Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (Carbondale:
> Southern Illinois UP, 1980), and, more importantly, having reread it,
> I've not only been given a whole bunch of new ideas, but I can also see
> where certain ideas of "mine" may have come from.   One of which is the
> notion of GR AS film (Ch. 3, "'Making the Unreal Reel': Film in
> Gravity's Rainbow"), as filmic, and here, after Kuloshov and Griffith,
> not to mention King Kong (that quintessential twen cen "badass" of "Is
> it O.K. to be a Luddite?"  Also brings in Hugh Kenner's The Poetry of
> Ezra Pound to interesting effect), he mentions in particular Sergei
> Eisenstein ...

I'm all eyes, not having seen this Cowart text you are sharing. But I would
opine that the whole GR text is a rear guard action, by the text itself, in
attempt to purchase a little more time for itself. Itself both in the
generic sense of "the novel," a moribund form, given film and whatever else
is to come (but we actually know that now, don't we?) and "itself" as GR, a
specific example or manifestation of that form. The text is verging on
self-awareness, after all, or at least, parasitizing each of ours to keep
itself going. Oedipa pulled the same ploy, but didn't realize she was
fictional, until, like her name sake, she was enlightened (we assume) by the
awful truth, or whatever went on behind that auction room door. But it is,
as you have noted elsewhere, a vision thing:

    "Vision must be the last to go. There must also be a nearly
imperceptible line between an eye that reflects and an eye that receives."
(V., p82, Bantam)

Which reminds me of Coetze's NYRB art. on W. Benjamin:

"The key concept that Benjamin invents (though his diary hints
 it was in fact the brainchild of the bookseller and publisher
 Adrienne Monnier) to describe what happens to the work of
 art in the age of its technological reproducibility (principally
 the age of the camera‹Benjamin has little to say about
 printing) is loss of aura. Until roughly the middle of the
 nineteenth century, he says, an intersubjective relationship of
 a kind survived between an artwork and its viewer: the viewer
 looked and the artwork, so to speak, looked back. "To
 perceive the aura of a phenomenon [means] to invest it with
 the capacity to look at us in turn." There is thus something
 magical about aura, derived from ancient links, now waning,
 between art and religious ritual."

In other words, the art ain't looking back anymore. Vision is the last to
go. The text, as an artistic process may be screaming for itself. Call it an
un-painted surrealist work, entitled: The Sacrifice of Phonism.

> This is, of course, a controversial claim here--what isn't?--but there
> is a certain indeterminacy to the source of that "screaming," to the
> terminus of that "evacuation," at least if that section is read
> independently of the rest--the "whole," though some will argue one not
> need go nearly that far--of the text.  My recollection is--indeed, my
> argument has been--that it's really only the epigraph from Wernher von
> Braun preceding that section (indeed, preceding the body of the text)
> and the mention of the impacted V-2 later that in any way collapses (to
> continue the quantum physical trope) the various possible wave functions
> here to the particular possibility that that "screaming" is the V-2
> (although, of course, then the V-2, falling supersonically, would
> already have hit), that we are indeed reading of an air raid evacauation

Well, as discussed quite thoroughly (what a bizarre word! some dopplered
form of "through," I suspect, as in: through the looking glass), in the GR
read through, there is cause and effect v. Mexico's take on things, which
seems to echo what you're saying.
> 
> But it seems to me now that it might also only be the mention of Pirate
> Prentice draeming that in any way causes one suddenly to read that
> section AS a dream, much less as Pirate's dream.  Is that the case?  At
> any rate, you no doubt see why Eisenstein set me off here.  That montage
> thing, any given shot taking on, or, at any rate, implying, any
> particular meaning only ultimately in relation to the shots it is
> juxtaposed with.  "Two film pieces of any kind, placed together,
> invariably combine into a new concept, a new quality, arising out of
> that juxtaposition" (Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Scene, quoted in
> Cowart, p. 58).   Sure, Pynchon spliced that WvB epigraph before, Pirate
> Prentice, his dreaming, that V-2, London, WWII, even, after, but that
> really only foregrounds that indeterminacy, as it it certainly never
> resolved within that "shot," and it still only tenuously resolved in the
> "montage" at hand ...

I'm not really a film person, I would defer to davemarc or maybe Mr. Romeo.
Wasn't Eisenstein a big topic for Delillo? That escape from underground
thing? Or, do I have the wrong director?

Anyway, I guess it's time to return to V.,

jody