GRGR Jessica Swanlake u.s.w. -- names and naming in GR

[Ben Johnson]

While I don't think the world is ready for "Trivial Pursuit -- the Gravity's Rainbow edition" (speaking of mindless pleasures), the minutiae of GR, especially relating to names, not only reward but demand scrutiny.  These elaborate word games (reminiscent of Nabokov, eh?) are part of the novel's process, its "progressiive knotting into" (V3.25) a tapestry, one subject of which is the blurriness of various margins -- those separating fact and fantasy, perception and hallucination,
stimulus and response.  So it is with character names.  "There may be no gods, but there is a pattern:  names by themselves may have no magic, but the act of naming, the physical utterance, obeys the pattern" (V322.15-17).  "Jessica Swanlake" obeys the pattern:  the name itself conjures grace and beauty (as has been noted elsewhere in this thread), and its quietly allusive quality, invoking Tchaikovsky's ballet (the story of which, according to my superannuated copy of the Harvard Brief Dictionary of Music, concerns "the conflict of Prince Siegfried against the Evil Power in his attempt to woo the Swan Queen, Odette") as well as the argot of the game of darts (in which the phrases "swans in a lake" and "three in a bed" apparently  connote the same obvious thing), sheds light on this particular lacuna of the plot, and on some Bigger Themes in the novel as well.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20051206/7deefba2/attachment.html>