GRGR: Jessica Swanlake

[John Doe]

I also highly doubt any deliberate allusional intent
on Pynchon's part to Dracula by way of "Swanlake";
yes, the film is mentioned a few times...yes Pynchon
has the sort of multi-referential imagination that
tempts one to pull all the stops and run wild spilling
out every conceivable connotation and symbolic
possibility...but...I agree that this can in certain
places be taken too far...yes, it's much fun to dazzle
ourselves with how many elliptical and tangential
associations we can generate froma any given textual
item...but we still need to sit a back a moment and
ask ourselves did the author REALLY have that
particular notion in mind or even in the back of his
mind when he chose to render it?....
   I, like the rest of you, can produce ooodles of
tenable layered symbolisms to any narrative element;
say, look at all the fun we can have attributing
polysemantics to the octopus Grigori; man, we can have
a FIELD DAY with that one! We can fill a notebook and
then some with just what the meaning of an "octopus"
has in the novel....but again, I think the key to
thoughtfull discrimination of meanings is to presume
Pynchon on the whole was quite aware of MOST of the
discovered associations, but as has been the case with
Joyce, we shouldn't presume that his brain made every
connection that every reader "discovers"....that's
assuming a tad too much....sometimes, a cigar is just
a cigar; writers of his temperament I'm willing to
bet, not only use very loaded terms, but also,
occasionally, just for the cheek of it, use just plain
whimsy...anyone who's ever read the introduction to
Slow Learner should realize that he did just that; he
used 37 degrees in Entropy and L'Grippe Espaniole in
the Small Rain I think it was, for rather cheesy
reasons...also, I think he has enough humor in him to
to see that it's more dynamic to use not only thickly
layered symbolistic expressions, but to pepper them
with some shallow ones as well....I think the Swanlake
name suggests grace, some fragility ( they have long
slender necks and Roger admires her nape at one point
), mortality ( swansong ),and of course beauty and the
ballet....he MAY have had the Dracula soundtrack in
mind, sure, but it is difficult to make sense of just
how it pertains here...i'm sure we can find SOMETHING
in Stokers story that nicelyn parallels certain
features of Jessica in GR, but would we be pushing it
a bit? I think so...


  

--- jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> > <<I read Jessica's name as evoking the ballet,
> rather
> > than the music -- not the specific plot of Swan
> Lake
> > (which is *the* ballet, after all), but in terms
> of
> > the poise and precision of a prima ballerina. Cf.
> > Milton Gloaming explaining Zipf's Principle of
> Least
> > Effort to her, "even her bewilderment graceful"
> > (32).>>
> >
> > ***
> 
> On 04/12/2005 dmeury wrote:
> 
> > Swan Lake is the dance, the story, and the music. 
> It
> > is also associated with the movie, Dracula,
> references
> > to whom are explicitly and inferrentially made in
> the
> > text.
> >
> > I am certainly not arguing against your preference
> but
> > I think there can be multiple suggestive
> properties
> > operating here and throughout the work.  This is
> why
> > GR is so much bigger than its page-count. [..]
> 
> One can read anything, from assassinations and
> auto-eroticism to 
> Zoroastrianism, into anything. And more power to
> them.
> 
> But one can also decide not to, I hope. Even though
> 'Dracula' pops up 
> in a little while (Bela Lugosi, actually, in
> relation to Géza 
> Rószavöglyi), I don't read a reference to it in
> Jessica's surname. No 
> offence intended.
> 
> For me, Jessica's name evokes aspects of her
> character, the fact that 
> she is conscious of her physical beauty and grace,
> and that she is 
> constantly performing, as a ballerina does on stage.
> (But I do also 
> like the correlation with the darts term "swans in a
> lake" just pointed 
> out.) While it's not a "preference", I'm not
> imposing my reading on 
> anyone, and I'd hope others are able to show the
> same courtesy.
> 
> best
> 
> 
> 



		
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