AtD hightlights (was: Monk' motto ...)

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

>Pages 666 (...) //: [Spoiler alert]

Yeah, many reviewers have pointed out this scene. Though I like the basic 
idea to downsize the Beast quite a bit, I think the joke is predictable and 
a little lame. From a, say, 'formalistic' point of view there are two 
interesting things to note here. One is that the crucial piece of info comes 
from a text-external source (cf. Revelation 13.18) that can only be 
identified when the page number is taken into account. This is tricky, but I 
think --- since bible belt fundamentalists take this very source literally 
and use it as a blueprint for their political voting behaviour --- Pynchon 
should and could have made more out of it. (Comically enough, one of my 
telephone numbers ends with 666 and even here in secularized northern 
Germany people tend to give me strange looks after they have taken down the 
digits.) The second issue to note is --- "Reader, she bit him" --- that 
Pynchon is adressing the reader directly. This doesn't happen too often in 
this novel, does it? Despite all iceland spar und bilocations there isn't 
much "ontological pluralism" in the social interaction between author and 
reader. That was different in GR, where, as Brian McHale ("You used to know 
what these words mean. Misreading Gravity's Rainbow") did work out, the 
different and voluntarily unclear ways in which the word "you" got used 
enabled every reader to feel here adressed and there not in a direct 
idiosyncratic way and thus to (re)paint his very own Rainbow. Yet perhaps it 
is, in times where even intelligent critics praise a book like "The 
Corrections" (how I regret to have finished this one), no longer possible to 
really go for artistic complexity. But hey, I'm now on page 505 of Against 
the day and have still more than half of the new Pynchon book to read. A 
reason to be happy.
Kai