Re GR square brackets

[Jasper Fidget]

Hmm, I guess I should concede that (without building too much into the text
that's not offered), and the dates do pointedly break the setting.  What's
the setting of the parenthetical passage, then?  "Underground" would seem to
indicate London.  1966-1971 sounds like a span of dates in which GR could
have been written.  "Do you want to put this part in?" could be a
note-to-self.  Anyway, whatever, it's a frustrating passage.  I almost want
to believe it was left in by mistake.

"I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a
non-business letter."
--D. H. Lawrence

Jasper Fidget qua Jasper Fidget


----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 11:49 PM
Subject: Re: Re GR square brackets


> on 19/10/01 9:33 AM, Jasper Fidget at fakename at tokyo.com wrote:
>
> > The statement, "I know what your editors want" would be directed
> > toward the reporter/interviewer, and "We drank the blood of our enemies"
> > would therefore follow "A Raketen-Stadt Charlie Noble, you might
say....",
> > just continuing the response to the question.
>
> Yes, perhaps, but it's the repetition of this sentence further down the
> page, followed by the sentence "The blood of our friends, we cherished",
> which *is* inside the parenthesis, and which is perhaps the climax of this
> segment of text. Because of the way that the voice in parenthesis mimics
the
> words of the spokesman (in two of the three intrusions at least, the long
> central parenthesis seems to respond sarcastically to the Spokesman's joke
> about Charlie Noble) -- each time almost mockingly to my ear -- I'm more
> inclined to the view that this voice is neither the WSJ Interviewer nor
the
> Spokesman, nor that the comments have anything at all to do with "Slothrop
> qua Slothrop". In other words, it is extraneous to the dialogue. The years
> referenced in the parenthesis would be additional support for this
> conjecture.
>
> best
>
>
>