Ahab & Merleau-Ponty....Graves....

[Terrance]

Telluric Texts, Implicate Spaces
By Stefan Mattessich
University of San Francisco (1997) 
hamglik at sirius.com


     "Time is the
     Space that may not be seen," says Dixon's childhood
     teacher Emerson, and for Pynchon it is the invisible
     world that dwells in matter (quite literally, it turns
     out later in the novel, invaginated into the earth) and
     that can be seen after all (for Mason in fact sees it),
     so long as perception finds the right balance between
     opacity (the "deep Blank") and transparency ("too much
     Clarity"), the variable point of visual acuity that can
     never be fixed.

  9. Pynchon is conceptually close in anecdotal narrative
     details like these to what Merleau-Ponty calls a "human"
     or "anthropological space." Distinguished from a
     "geometrical" system of objective relationships between
     determined points that is experienced as perspective,
     convergence, depth and position by a synthesizing eye/I,
     "anthropological space" designates that spatial
     condition or frame that cannot be "put into perspective
     by consciousness" (256). Unlocatable and ungraspable,
     this "more primordial" dimension forms a kind of
     infinite set around the objective world which is not
     itself objectivizable, an "outside" in which
     Merleau-Ponty finds the "essential structure of our
     being [as a] being situated in relation to an
     environment" (284). This "relation" is one of
     implication in a totality, an envelopment of the subject
     in a pre-personal "depth" that, beneath or coterminous
     with geometric space, commits that subject to an
     existential immediacy irreducible to acts of
     comprehension. Anthropological space has the "thickness
     of a medium devoid of any thing" and indicates a "depth
     which does not yet operate between objects, which...does
     not yet assess the distance between them, and which is
     simply the opening of perception upon some ghost thing
     as yet scarcely qualified" (266). Such an experience of
     ghosts (and such a ghostly experience) precedes the
     differentiation of perception and dream, and as such it
     constitutes what Merleau-Ponty calls a "direction of
     existence," an intention immanent to the world in which
     it orients itself, a desire which is not the property of
     a constituted subject but a direction taken, a velocity
     or rate of change in a fluctuating and multiple space.
     The way Mason looks into the piece of quartz and sees
     the "huge, dark Eyes" of a ghost (Rebekah) is a pure
     perception which does not presuppose an act of
     consciousness within an objective or even an ontological
     order.[7] It cannot be that Mason sees a ghost in the
     crystal anymore than he can see the crystal without the
     ghost orienting his gaze or quickening his desire in it.
     This gyre-like implication of Mason in his world comes
     through most distinctly in the "recoil" which it
     produces in him, the terror that almost causes him to
     drop the crystal and which signifies that death, that
     nothingness, that infinite regress at the heart of time
     as it reduces "Mason" to no one and his world to a
     "non-place" of ghostly "pictures." This is why Wicks
     Cherrycoke, commenting on Emerson's homily about time as
     invisible space, adds "that out of Mercy, we are blind
     as to Time,--for we could not bear to contemplate what
     lies at its heart" (326).

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.997/review-5.997

Just sticking a few scraps of the elephant on the wall.

Pynchon, very early on, is interested in the problem Melville attempted
to solve with Ishmael and Ahab: giving voice or narrative to the
impersonal. How does one tell a tale and not betray the world of the
dead? How does one sing of silence? How does one cast off the sophistic
and solipsistic first person? Is Ihsmael the narrator of M-D? Sure, and
Wicks is the narrator of M&D, but this isn't saying very much and isn't
very interesting. 

We find in texts only what we put into them, and if ever any kind of
history has suggested the interpretations which should be puit on it, it
is the history of philosophy. We shall find in ourselves, and nowhere
else, the unity and true meaning of phenomenology. It is lessa question
of counting up quotations than of determining and expressing in concrete
form this **phenomenology for ourselves** (M's emphasis) which has given
a number of present day readers the impression, on reading Husserl or
Heidegger, not so much of encountering a new philosophy as of
recognizing what they had been waiting for.  

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology Of Perception


jbor wrote:
> 
> on 6/2/02 4:31 AM, The Great Quail at quail at libyrinth.com wrote:
> 
> > Terrance writes,
> >
> >> You wouldn't, but the narrator of M-D does.
> >
> > Well, you certainly have a point there!
> 
> Isn't Ishmael the narrator of _Moby Dick_?!