re KK

[severs at fas.harvard.edu]

Sorry if someone's pointed this out already, but the choice of KK for this
thread's subject heading makes me think Pynchon chose the Kenosha Kid as
Slothrop's hallucination-text in order to slyly have the moment korrespond to
the much later riff on Kute Korrespondences ("_garden hose_ feeding endlessly
the desert" or somesuch) and the search for (as the end of that stirring
passage has it) the "meanest sharp slivers of truth."  Since that latter KK
passage, seeming to describe an unspecified patient on the couch, has
(plausibly and ad nauseum) been interpreted as a meta-description of the kind
of connective work a reader must do in consuming and understanding GR, could I
suggest that one way out of this debate on the passivity or activity of
Slothrop in the first scene is to see his mind at that moment as being like the
reader's mind at any moment -- active, occupying, obfuscating... see here the
endless theorizations of what the mind "does" while reading, both well and
badly?

Best,
Jeff



Quoting Tim Strzechowski <dedalus204 at comcast.net>:

> Stating that "these changes on the text [...] are occupying Slothrop's
> awareness" (61) doesn't signify deliberate action on Slothrop's part.  In
> fact, Slothrop's awareness -- being occupied by these textual changes --
> suggests passivity more than activity.
>
> "Willfully obfuscatory"?  I don't see it . . .