Rainbow & Parabola (was NP)

[jbor]

> "But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola.
> They must have guessed, once or twice--guessed and refused to
> believe--that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward
> that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no
> second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved
> for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the
> Rainbow, and they its children...."
> 
> GR.209

Precisely: "as if it were". It's a literary conceit, not a literal
assertion.

on 25/7/04 11:39 AM, jbor wrote:

>> The only way to equate the trajectory of a projectile under the force of
>> gravity with the arc of a rainbow is via the rhetorical scheme (or trope) of
>> Parabola, defined as a "resemblance mystical" (Puttenham, _The Arte of
>> English Poesy_, 1569), and thus as a function of language and communication
>> (some might say intersubjectivity, or poetic licence, or "transformation",
>> or even "spin").
> 
> Point here being that, yes, the V-2 rocket's arc is a (if not the) primary
> referent of the novel's title, but that as with those other phenomena to
> which it is connected in the text: the curve of a banana or an erect penis,
> the earth's orbit around the sun, S-shaped spokes and architecture, a
> theatre's proscenium arch, running water warping the square holes of a
> harmonica or the passage of human life and death, and more; it is a literary
> conceit which makes it so.

best