Liminality and Oven-Games in Gravity's Rainbow

[Dave Monroe]

>From Katalin Orban, Ethical Diversions: The
Post-Holocaust  Narratives of Pynchon, Abish, DeLillo,
and Spigelman (New York: Routledge, 2005), Ch. 3,
"Pinpricks on the Ars(e) Narrandi: Liminality and
Oven-Games in Gravity's Rainbow," pp. 115-67 ...

NARRTIVE TACTICS (1)--"YOU ARE THE TRAVELER' AID"

"In his Against Ethics, John Caputo makes a useful
distinction bewteen heteromorphic and heteronomic
difference, meaning difference as multiplicity and
alterity, respectively.  He defines teh first as an
explosive excess of polyvalent, self-multiplying,
plural differences, where 'forces differentiate
themselves, break up from within, by reason of their
own internal instability, their inability to hold
themselves in, to keep themselves intact, by reason of
their own uncontainable plenitude.'  Heteronomic
difference, by contrast, is defined as the difference
f alterity that disrupts from without, dislocating the
same 'so that the same and the other cannot fold into
a unity.'
   "... I will explore how certain narrative
structures and modes of address in Gravity's Rainbow
shift beween these two kinds of difference, often
making it difficut to maintain a clear distinction
between the two.  I will try to show how a modulation
between heteromorphic multiplicity and heteronomic
alterity is relevant to ethics in this text...." (p.
148)

Caputo, John D.  Against Ethics.
   Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.

http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=21293

NARRATIVE TACTICS (2)--THE STRAINS OF PERIPHERAL
VISION

"In this section, I want to pursue the ways in which
the kind of heteromorphic mobility I have been
discussing opens to a heteronomical difference: the
'other' rather than the 'many' of the text.  This
susceptibility to heteronomic difference--the text's
peripheral vision and erratic response to the
liminal--is not only this work's barely visible
ethical performance, but also its opening to the
Holocaust.  Conversely, the way 'Holocaust' haunts
this work is important insofar as it instantiates
(though does not regulate) that elusive 'different
kind of thing' which this novel-that-isn's also is."
(p. 156)

That last comment refrs to McHoul and Wills'
assertion, contra, say, Harolod Bloom, that GR is NOT
a novel.  Will see if it becomes relevat to what I end
up posting.  Meanwhile, too many interruptions, so ...

Will continue as I can ...

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