VLVL2 (9.5): "Homing Brainlessly in Once Again"

[Dave Monroe]

"DL flew back to California, homing brainlessly in
once again on the Kunoichi Retreat, where she'd been
coming since her adolescence, then leaving, then
coming back again, building a long-term love-hate
affair with the Attentive staff, Sister Rochelle in
particular." (VL, Ch. 9, p. 153)


"homing brainlessly in once again"

yo-yo
"Benny Profane [...] human yo-yo," 9; "travelling up
and down the east coast like a," 10; again, 21; "New
Year's Eve party was to end all yo-yoing," 30; "The
furthest point from the yo-yo hand is called [...]
apocheir," 35; "decided to spend the day like a yo-yo,
shuttling on the subway back and forth underneath 42nd
Street," 37; "He's a yo-yo," 39; umbilical, 29, 34,
49, 217; "Rachel gets her yo-yo back," 213; "He was
king of the subway. He must have been there all night,
yo-yoing out to Brooklyn and back," 215; "Any
sovereign or broken yo-yo must feel like this after a
short time of lying inert," 217; "spiderwebs woven of
yo-yo string: a net or a trap," 288; Whole Sick Crew's
rules of yo-yoing, 302; "There are nine million yo-yos
in this town." 303; "down to Havana and back. You'll
be a yo-yo champion." 353; "In which the yo-yo string
is revealed as a state of mind" 367; Fortune's, 367;
"After a day of yo-yoing," 371; "Malta alone drew
them, a clenched fist around a yo-yo string." 444

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/alpha/x-z.html


"a long-term love-hate affair"

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Sigmund Freud
relates the story of a game his grandson invented at
the age of one and a half, before he could speak many
words. He used to throw small objects away from him,
then say "o-o-o-o" with pleasure. He also took a
wooden reel attached to a piece of string, and threw
it over the edge of his cot, so that it disappeared.
After saying "o-o-o-o," he would pull it back to
himself and say, "da." He repeated this game over and
over. Freud and the boy’s mother understood him to be
saying "Fort" and "Da" (German for gone and there).

Freud theorized that this game of disappearance and
return allowed the boy to manage his anxiety about the
absences of his mother, to whom he was very attached.
By controlling the actual presence and absence of an
object, he was able to manage the virtual presence of
his mother. The Fort / Da game was the child’s
invention of symbolism: the use of one object (wooden
reel) to represent another, absent object (mother)....

http://cas.buffalo.edu/classes/eng/willbern/BestSellers/Catcher/FortDa.htm

The game of "fort-da" was invented by Freud's
grandson, who was then one and a half years old (1955:
14-17). In the simplest form of this play, the child
had a piece of string attached to a wooden spool which
he threw from him, murmuring "o-o-o-o," then pulled
back, saying "da." Freud (and the child's mother)
interpreted the first sound as the child's version of
"fort" ("gone away"), the second as the German for
"there" (as in English "there it is!"). Freud
associated this game with the child's attempt to
assert mastery in play to compensate for an
emotionally fraught situation where he had no control,
his mother's occasional excursions from the household
without him (1955: 15). Freud also linked the
empowerment of this early game with the child's
apparent lack of reaction to his mother's death
several years later (1955, 16, n. 1).

In general, Freud was using the fort-da game to
illustrate the operations of the economy of pleasure
that he had described, and to introduce the notion of
the return of the repressed; that is, the neurotic
effects of an earlier psychic trauma upon later
behavior....

http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Concorde/7898/fortda.htm

http://www.uv.es/~fores/programa/alanaycock_derrida.html

Freud, Sigmund.  Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
   Ed. James Strachey.  The Standard Edition of the
   Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
   Vol. XVIII.  London: Hogarth Press, 1955 [1920].

http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/backlist/000769.htm

Like the mirror phase, the fort-da game brings the
child both gains and losses. It was originally named
and described by Freud in 1915, having watched his
grandson Ernst throw a cotton reel out of sight then
retrieve it by means of an attached thread, while
accompanying the two actions with the sounds 'o' and
'a' respectively. Freud hypothesised that the reel
symbolised the child's mother and that the game was a
way of coming to terms with her absence. In throwing
the reel away the child moved from a state of
helplessness (I am abandoned by my mother) to one of
agency or even mastery (I abandon my mother). Lacan's
subsequent reading of the game de-emphasised the
supposed bid for mastery and instead proposed that it
represented the child's accession to language. The
emphasis came to be placed on the child's invocation
of a symbol to stand in for what was missing and
through which the mother's comings and goings could be
represented. It was her absence that prompted the
adoption of the reel as signifier, which stood in a
metaphoric relation to mother and child, present only
by virtue of the absence of what it represented. As we
shall see, this is crucially the case with the
subject's self-representation. The fort-da game is a
language system in microcosm, in that the signifiers
'fort' and 'da' are defined relationally, each by what
it is not. The subject, therefore, is caught up in a
pre-existing language whose terms are organised
diacritically and not by any relation to the real.

http://www30.brinkster.com/njbp/txts/lw1.htm

Lacan, Jacques.  The Four Fundamental Concepts of
   Psychoanalysis.  Trans. Alan Sheridan.  New York:
   W.W. Norton, 1977.

http://www.wwnorton.com/npb/nppsych/old/classics/conceptsofpa.htm

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