GRGR (1): Chapters and Blocks

[Tim Strzechowski]

A word about the series of seven squares which separate each chapter:

>From what I recall, there's been some speculation as to the significance of the squares, some readers even speculating that they represent the small holes along the edge of a reel of film.

An acquaintance of mine who is an independent scholar and Pynchon enthusiast once told me that there was an an interview with Corlies "Cork" Smith, the editor of GR, who claimed that Pynchon absolutely *hated* asterisks as chapter dividers and wanted to use little Porky Pig heads to separate the chapters of the novel.  However, there were legal issues surrounding the use of the image, so Pynchon settled for the small blocks, which were developed by the Viking typesetters.

Sorry, I have no link to document this.  Just passin' along a personal conversation, for what it's worth . . .

Of course, there's always this:

[...] The task of close-in, line-by-line editing was assigned to Edwin Kennebeck, Viking's head copy editor, who emerges as one of the undersung heroes of this saga. His letters to Pynchon are warm, chatty, and exceptionally meticulous-he obviously "got" the book, and he and Pynchon clearly got on. [...]

Kennebeck's letters solve one mildly important interpretive question, sort of. It is generally thought that the line of seven squares that serves as a graphic device to separate the unnumbered chapters in the novel is meant to suggest the sprocket holes in film reels, indicating that the book is to be "read" cinematically as a kind of film in prose. Wrong. In one of his letters Kennebeck refers pointedly to the "oblong holes" in censored correspondence from World War II soldiers, then termed V-mail (there's that letter again), and in a letter to Donald Barthelme accompanying a finished copy of the book, Kennebeck makes jocular mention of the sprocket-hole theory, first floated in the Poirier review, and comments, "I little knew what I was contributing to the history of literature." Sometimes a rectangle is just a rectangle-or maybe a censor's mark. [...]

http://www.bookforum.com/pynchon.html 


Tim

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