ATDTDA (18) 499-500: Renfrewerfner

[John Bailey]

The Grand Cohen bids his farewell to Yashmeen, dosing out the usual quasi-spiritual babble about reincarnation, Pythagorean doctrine and the appropriate behaviours a spy should adopt as a result thereof.
 
He does mention Renfrew and Werfner in an interesting way – “Though desperately carnal themselves, those two, yet their allegiance is not to the given world.”
 
“Of the flesh but not of the world?” is Y’s response. “How peculiar. How can that be? It sounds like maths, only more practical somehow.”
 
This is a puzzling section. Is it suggesting that Renfrewerfner are two physically distinct individuals, but are in some way one? I mean, that’s a moot point throughout AtD. But maybe The GC’s idea is that they’re normal fleshy folk who have intellectually forsaken certain demands of the physical world in order to play out their little metaphysical war. They’ve adopted a ridiculous binary opposite/mirror/bilocation relationship as a maths exercise, despite the fact that they’re actually two distinct people.
 
Bilocation, then, being a kind of problematising of the Iceland spar idea – making the same object appear as several images might be a dangerous illusion, leading us away from the actual, original image being split. 
 
Then again, maybe finding kute correspondences between discrete things (ie the two professors) might, as so often in Pynchon’s stuff, be an equally worrying tactic. Maybe Renfrew and Werfner are playing out their relationship’s mirrored aspects precisely for its mathematical interest, even though in actuality it’s going to result in some pretty horrible stuff. They’re removing themselves from “the world” even though they’re still “of the flesh”.
_________________________________________________________________
Win a $16K adventure holiday to Rajasthan, India. Enter now!
http://ninemsn.com.au/share/redir/adTrack.asp?mode=click&clientID=799&referral=windowslivehotmailtagline&URL=http://travel.ninemsn.com.au/compIntro.aspx?compId=2404
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20070930/5c0dd355/attachment.html>