ATDDTA (6) 166 - 170 a

[Tore Rye Andersen]

David Morris (about transmuting shit to gold):

>Interesting insight, which is clearly - from the passages quoted- a
>conscious strategy in Pynchon's big novels.  But some of the linkages (not 
>the prose) should be shit, right?  Some clues should lead no
>where, or to false conclusions.  But thinking back to GR, nothing is
>ever really certain, no conclusion doesn't have an explicit
>contradiction somewhere else in the text.  So in many ways "truth"
>really is left to the discretion of the reader - so in THAT regard,
>nothing really is shit.  The patterns in the text can never clearly
>resolve, and this is I guess what makes GR so different from Ulysses
>(which nobody ever clearly understands either the first time through).

By and large, you're right. The construction of "truth" is in many ways left 
to the discretion of the reader, and GR is filled with descriptions of 
structures that appear differently to different observers. About The White 
Visitation, e.g., we hear that "from a distance no two observers, no matter 
how close they stand, see quite the same building in that orgy of 
self-expression" (GR, 83); about the Brennschluss points for different 
rockets we hear that:

"There's a Brennschluss point for every firing site. They still hang up 
there, all of them, a constellation waiting to have a 13th sign of the 
Zodiac named for it... but they lie so close to Earth that from many places 
they can't be seen at all, and from different places inside the zone where 
they can be seen, they fall into completely different patterns...." (GR, 
302)

And about the Rocket itself:

"But the Rocket has to be many things, it must answer to a number of 
different shapes in the dreams of those who touch it [...] its text is 
theirs to permute and combine into new revelations, always unfolding.... 
[....] Each will have his personal Rocket." (GR, 727)

The similarity between GR itself and these shifting patterns which are 
dependent upon the perspective of the observer is pretty obvious (the Rocket 
is even called a "text" in the final quote, just to drive the point home): 
Reading GR, then, is a matter of projecting one's own world, drawing one's 
own connections between the disparate elements of the novel. But even though 
one can never construct the ultimate reading, so to speak, of GR - the 
reading which finally tells the "truth" about the novel - I'd still argue 
that some connections and linkages are demonstrably more sound than others, 
more loyal to the text, as it were.

To take an example that has recently been discussed on the list: With its 
rose-like pattern, General Wivern's dance on p. 594 can be said to resemble 
the explosion of an atomic bomb. The resemblance in itself constitutes a 
very tenuous connection between Hiroshima and the dance. There are plenty of 
roses etc. in GR, and it could just as easily be said that they were 
figurations of Hiroshima. The radio playing in the background on p. 592, 
however, tells us (via Weisenburger's research) that the dance takes place 
just as the A-bomb explodes on the other side of the world, in Hiroshima, 
and this information, IMO, makes the connection "real", even though it's 
still a projection.
The many ambiguities of GR can't be resolved into any ultimate truth, but 
I'd argue that there are many local "truths" in the novel; many local stable 
patterns that function as some sort of signposts as we navigate our way 
through the wilderness of the text.

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