ATD SPOILER p 262-269

[kelber at mindspring.com]

>Spoilers whole book







-----Original Message-----
>From: Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net>


Rather than lumping all metaphoriical uses together, I'd
>emphasize Pynchon's *range* from loose to tight metaphor. As I noted before,
>Iceland spar<->bilocation is at the loose end: crystal brefringence goes
>back to 1669, and no physicist of the 1890s would have thought there was
>anything especially mysterious or woo-woo about it. So it's purest poetic
>association to link that to Zombini's doubled volunteers, Renfrew/Werfner,
>and other kinds of twinning in the book. Likewise, "phosgene" is only
>etymologically related to light: whatever game P is playing with the
>Interdikt iline across the Balkans, in *our* world phosgene was a poison
>gas, period -- not a source of, or in any intersting way I know of connected
>to, annihilating light.

Another instance of this is on p. 613-4, where he traces the roots of the word "gas" from the Greek "chaos" and makes the leap from molecular chaos to imply that there's some sort of anarchistic principle involved in the worship or contemplation of gas.  Pynchon does have an incredible ability to leap back and forth between vastly different areas of knowledge and to find points of connection between them.