Liminality and Oven-Games in Gravity's Rainbow

[Dave Monroe]

Yet again 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 ...

   "I do not think Steven Weisenburger is right when
he claims, in defense of the politics and morality of
Gravity's Rainbow, that this episode [GR 432-3] at
'the novel's actual (if not virtual) center ... does
establish a normative base for Pynhon's stirical
aggressions.'  Given the way this text works, a
'normative base' as such is illusory and the ethics of
Gravity's Rainbow cannot rely on an Archimedean point
from which its values and (satirical) meanings becaome
detreinate.  The probem is not only that, as Schaub
suggests, 'normative values in Gravity's rainbow are
left to fend for themselves,' but that given the
heteromorphic mobility of the text, the more fully
this scene appears as a 'normative base' made visible,
the more efficiently it gets overwritten by all the
other frames and 'bases' of the text.
   "What is noteworthy is that the Holocaust, when it
rarely appears in the text elsewhere, does so in a way
radically different from the Pokler scene...." (pp.
163-4)

Weisenburger, Steven.  A Gravity's Rainbow Companion.
   Athens: U of Georgia P, 1988.

See p. 9.  Okay, too many interruptions today, and I
gotta run now, so ...

Bit not all too much left, one good session ...



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