Exitless Heresy

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
>     The tour now takes Pirate out into an open courtyard, where a small
>     crowd has formed around one of the Erdschweinhöhle delegates in a
>     rip-roaring argument with some advertising executive over what else
>     but the Heresy Question, already a pebble in the shoe of the
>     Convention, and perhaps to be the rock on which it will founder.
>                                                                 (538)
> 
> Don't know if the delegate is necessarily Enzian, but it's certainly one of
> his posse. 

We don't know this.  All we are told is that an advertising executive is
arguing with one of the Erdschweinhohole delegates. Why would someone
representing the Erdschweinhohle be arguing with an advertising
executive? We can't say for sure that the delegate is Erdschweinhohle. I
think Paul's suggestion that parsing may not be too fruitful and may
even be a hindrance here is good advise. 

What is meant by  "what else but the Heresy Question"? 

What else could it mean?  Well, what else but ...the Rocket and  this or
that....well and of course it means this or that....

I mean, what else could they be arguing about? 

Disorder? Chaos? Nonlinearity? Noise? Some Heretical Dispensation? Some
Reality? Nothingness? In/On/At/En the bottom of it ALL? No Exit? 

I still love the way Pirate just arrives in/on the scene here. A novice
no less. 

What else but a novice? 

Where? No Kansas anymore. The Zone? Not America? 

"Either way, they'll call it paranoia. They. Either you have stumbled,
indeed without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret
richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network  by which X
number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies,
recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the
official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative
to the exitless, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the
head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie. Ot you are
hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive
and elaborate, involving [... (mine)] so labyrinthine that it must have
meaning beyond just a practical joke. Or you are fantasying some such
plot, in which case you are a nut, Oediapa, out of your golgotha."
CL.170

How about Representing and Selling the Preterit--Erdschweinhohle
"product or business" (read genocide & diaspora history made for the
movies or amusement park) so as to increase sales? 


If Rapier's name can be applied to the entire episode (I doubt this) we
can apply it to "rip-roaring argument"  too. ]

Rapier: long, slender, two-edged sword with a cuplike hilt, used in the
16th and 17th centuries.  A light, sharp-pointed sword lacking a cutting
edge and used only for thrusting. 

What else could rip-roaring describe but a rip, a double edged rent of
the up/down roarious (pandemoniac) fun (revolt)? 


The Heresy Question would be the assorted Christ and Moses myths
> which have been built up around Enzian by the Zone-Hereros, wouldn't it?

Maybe. What Heresy do all these chance/supernatural events add up to? 
What is **THE** Heresy? 



> Enzian's one of the Counterforce's trump cards and great (non-)white hopes.
> The advertising exec. might just be telling the delegate that promoting
> Enzian as a new Saviour ain't gonna sell, and that maybe they should be
> working on a new marketing strategy if the Schwarzkommando is gonna come on
> board with the Counterforce. But the delegate is sticking to his guns, and
> to his faith. Meanwhile, the reader already knows that Enzian knows that all
> the religious hoopla surrounding him is just a sham.

We know Enzian resists the Jesus trip, but so what does our knowing what
he knows have to do with the Heresy Question? 


> 
> The tone of the narrative voice in this whole section sounds flip,
> facetious, as though it's mocking the whole crazy circus, and Pirate and
> Katje too.
> 
> best

I kinda think the narrative is mocking the reader too. The academic
reader. The reader that tries to connect the dots, the hereticals, the
gospel of St. Conceit/Conceit.