Liminality and Oven-Games in Gravity's Rainbow

[Dave Monroe]

... and yet more 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 ...

   "Blicero's meditations on the Oven ... ('So his
Destiny is the Oven: while the strayed children, who
never knew, who chang nothing but uniforms and cards
of idnetity, will survive and proper long beyond his
gases and cinders, his chinmey departure') is [sic]
echoed by the 'coarse and cindered passage of the
trains at night' embedded in prewar African memories
(GR 98-99, 102 ...).  And what crop up as bizarre and
fantastic details along the way explode into
sopa-heavy smell, ashes and holocaust at the end of
multiple analepses ... 

(["Pirate and Osvie Feel are laening" to, e.g., "fuel
consumed in the metered winter holocaust" to "a great
collective sleep"] GR 111-112) ....

"The 'Holocaust' unaccountably inserts itself into
what isostensibly a description of a London sunset....
 Because th sign 'Holocaust' is so out of place here,
it haunts the description of of smoke from the
chimneys on the rooftops, of ruin and destruction, the
great emptying out and the converging of millions.
   "Withinthe framework of a traditional, somewhat
coherent plot with which Gravity's Rainbow keeps
flirting, the peculiar attack of nausea and vertigo
induced in Slothrop in the Forbidden Wing of the
Casino Hermann Goering is probably caused by his
conditioning as an infant.  Slothrop himslef makes
this connection when finding his own name at long last
in a dossier on scientist Laszlo Jamf ....  If
Slothrop decides in retrospect that what haunts him in
both scenes is the smell of Imipolex G, the text
leaves itslef open to a different, more historical
haunting.  The lights of the casino appear glaring 'in
full holocaust' .... '[I]t's here that saturation hits
him' ... (GR 205).  This sudden onslaught is, once
again, marked as an obsession ....  And its breath now
is a gas ... '... it is the braeth of teh Forbidden
Wing ..' (GR 285). (This is what resurfaces later ...
as the 'breathing of Dora' ... [GR 432]).  The sign
'Holocaust' is part of an interpolated phrase, set off
from the rest of the sentence as marginal and
nonessential, yet foregrounded by its position...."
(pp. 165-6)

Okay, just one paragraph to go, for now, at least ... 



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