Liminality and Oven-Games in Gravity's Rainbow

Dave Monroe monropolitan at yahoo.com
Tue Jun 20 07:36:22 CDT 2006


And nominally, at least, to finish up in 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) Marrandi: Liminality and Oven-Games in
Gravity's Rainbow," pp. 115-67 ...

   "These traces play hide-and-seek withthe reader
just liek the child who appears and disappears to
Slothrop one night in an abandoned children's play
house full of teh horrible smell of burning hair ("The
doll's hair was human.  The smell of it burning is
horrible. [..] 'Why are you burning my doll's hair?'
'Well, it's not her own hair, you know.' 'Father said
it belonged to a Russian Jewess' [GR 282])....  What I
have been arguing all along is  that this play of
hide-and-seek is one of the most serious 'games' this
work is playing, one in which seriousness and anxiety
are hopelessly (hopefully?) mixed up with a play of
openness.  There is  nothing to secure that such
textual traces will be read in terms of traumatic
loss, for their liminality is not underwritten by
anything in the narrative that is also not overwritten
in this scattering encyclopedia.  Their haunting as
well as thei promise, invitation, even entreaty is a
mere possibility, where the lack of necessity only
turns into an unavoidable obligation through the
modality of obsession--correspondingly extravagant
modes of attendig to the text.  How can a text work in
its unguaranteed posibilities?  This is what is at
stake in Gravity's Rainbow in general and it and in
its performative, erratic and minimal ethics in
particular.  And it is in this sense the book takes
perhaps its greatest risk with the trace of the
holocaut, which it brings to the threshold of
perception, neither remembered, nor forgotten." (pp.
166-7)

Hm.  Maybe I should have included more of the stuff on
ethics, on obsession, on ...

But that wasn't so painful, now, was it?  Okay ...

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