NPPF: Summary Line 347

[Jasper Fidget]

> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
> Behalf Of Scott Badger
> 
> Line 347: old barn
> 

> 
> The first night is a wash-out, the pyrotechnics of a storm overwhelm
> anything the ghost might produce. Hazel fails to find a companion for the
> second visit, but decides, despite her parents attempts to stop her, to go
> it alone. Only nine minutes after settling in, she hears "scrappy and
> scrabbly sounds". Six minutes later, a "roundlet of pale light" appears,
> inviting play it would seem. Then, "gone". Twelve minutes more, and it
> returns. The "luminous circlet" assures Hazel that it is not a
> will-of-the-wisp, or trickster, but that "it" *is* dead. In the process,
> Hazel and the apparition work out a crude means of communication on the
> wall
> of the barn, a "keyboard of dry wood"(line 649). With great effort and
> persistence, Hazel records "a short line of simple letter-groups". Later,
> despite "abominable" headaches, and with "endless" effort and "infinite
> patience and disgust", Kinbote applies himself (to the point, even, of
> distraction from his more appealing night-games) to cracking the code.


Good notes, Scott, thanks.  I found Boyd's Maud's ghost theory interesting,
but I think the light is either a hoax or an accident.  On p. 187: "[Jane]
tells me she suggested that the White twins (nice fraternity boys accepted
by the Shades) would come [with Hazel to the barn] instead.  But Hazel flat
out refused this new arrangement."  The word "twins" alone should raise an
eyebrow here.  Part of the twins pattern involves a parallel between
something seen and something else hidden.  What if the twins *do* go to the
barn.  What if they bring a flashlight and decide to play a trick on poor
Hazel...?

On p. 188, after some encoded communication between Hazel and the light, the
light's "jumps would get more and more listless" [as the twin with the
flashlight grew weary of the labor of the joke], and then "the roundlet went
limp like a tired child and finally crawled into a chink" [as it became the
other twin's turn with the flashlight] "out of which it suddenly flew with
extravagant brio and started to spin around the walls in its eagerness to
resume the game" [with the fresh energy of the rested White twin].

Another possibility is that the light is the product of car headlights from
the nearby highway shining through a crack in the barn wall (as a moving
light will seem to hover on a wall then abruptly drop down as the vehicle
passes), which went unnoticed on the first night because of the electric
storm (187) and on the third night perhaps because Sybil or John obscured
the crack in the wall.

Don't call me Occam, but either seems a more plausible explanation, and fits
into the artifact/arbitrary interpretation theme.  Hazel just applies her
own system of meaning onto what she sees the light doing, and there's no
evidence it had any notion of her rules.

Jasper