Reading "Rainbow" - the Central Mystery

[János Székely]

Having just re-read GR for word-by-word (not for the second time) something
struck me. I don't know if anybody has noticed or written about the
following.

Close to the geometrical center of the book there is a well-hidden,
comically-camouflaged passage about the USS Badass missing the hijacked
U-Boot. The two courses intersect in space but not in time* because* Bodine
has laced the coffee in the Badass mess with "a massive dose of Oneirine".So
the psychotropic effect of Jamf's drug turns into physical reality in some
unexplained way.
Now both Imipolex G (a polyimide) and Oneirine (an indole) are Jamf's
inventions, both are aromatic heterocyclic compounds and their monomers are
rather similar. Even the smell can be the same. The combined presence of
Imipolex G (responsible for sexual arousal) and Oneirine (responsible for
the time-modulating, delusion-turned-into-reality effect) could account for
both Slothrop's map and the closing two subchapters, where, if we stick to
narrative continuity, the same rocket which was launched with Gottfried
inside in 1945 returns sometime in the Nixon era. (There is an explicit
parallel between Slothrop and Gottfried as the latter "knows" the smell of
Imipolex. "It was in a room when he fell asleep so loing ago, so deep in
sweet paralyzed childhood," suggesting he was also conditioned in a way by
Jamf. Slothrop also recognizes the smell. But that might be also the smell
of Oneirine.)
This is not an explanation, just a "closing in on", not forgetting that the
description if the  "Oneirine haunt" can be easily applied to Pynchonic
fiction itself etc., starting new cycles of interpretation.

János


2008/12/28 Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>

> Timmy's House of Sprinkles
> Saturday, December 27, 2008
> Reading "Rainbow"
>
>
> I was tempted to do a one-word review - "Wow" - and leave it at that.
> I'm congenitally incapable of brevity, though.  One word may be the
> proper response to 776 pages of incredibly dense and purple prose, but
> I feel like I have to keep on digging.
>
>
>
> http://seberin.blogspot.com/2008/12/reading-rainbow.html
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20081228/bb10c3e6/attachment.html>