seven squares in GR

[cl.levy at free.fr]

Hey guys, here's your quote!

http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_05/pynchon.html

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.

Best
Clement