from the terrif article Dave M. just sent on C of L49

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jul 12, 2009, at 10:43 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:
> From Michael Berube, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson,
> Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992),
> Chapter 4, "Against the Avant: Pynchon's Products, Pynchon's
> Pornographies," pp. 207-66:

>  . . . what is distinctive about Gravity';s Rainbow's postsomething
> (-modern, -avantgarde, -rhetorical) treatment of culture is that its
> emphasis is not on artifacts but on their transmission and
> reinscription . . .


	"Yeah well," as film critic Mitchell Prettyplace puts it in his
	definitive 18-volume study of King Kong, "you know, he did love
	her, folks." Proceeding from this thesis, it appears that
	Prettyplace has left nothing out, every shot including out-takes
	raked through for every last bit of symbolism, exhaustive
	biographies of everyone connected with the film, extras, grips,
	lab people ... even interviews with King Kong Kultists, who to be
	eligible for membership must have seen the movie at least 100
	times and be prepared to pass an 8-hour entrance exam .... And
	yet, and yet: there is Murphy's Law to consider, that brash Irish
	proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem-when everything
	has been taken care of, when nothing can go wrong, or even
	surprise us ... something will. . .
	GR, P 279

	Mucho thrust the mike in front of her, mumbling, "You're on, just
	be yourself." Then in his earnest broadcasting voice, "How do
	you feel about this terrible thing?" "Terrible," said Oedipa.

	"Wonderful," said Mucho. He had her go on to give listeners a
	summary of what'd happened in the office. "Thank you, Mrs
	Edna Mosh," he wrapped up, "for your eyewitness account of
	this dramatic siege at the Hilarius Psychiatric Clinic. This is
	KCUF Mobile Two, sending it back now to 'Rabbit' Warren, at
	the studio." He cut his power. Something was not quite right.

	"Edna Mosh?" Oedipa said. "It'll come out the right way," Mucho
	said. "I was allowing for the distortion on these rigs, and then
	when they put it on tape."
	CoL49, PC 113/114

	She tried to struggle out of the silent, gesturing swarm, but was
	too weak. Her legs ached, her mouth tasted horrible. They
	swept her on into the ballroom, where she was seized about the
	waist by a handsome young man in a Harris tweed coat and
	waltzed round and round, through the rustling, shutlling hush,
	under a great unlit chandelier. Each couple on the floor danced
	whatever was in the fellow's head: tango, two-step, bossa nova,
	slop. But how long, Oedipa thought. could it go on before
	collisions became a serious hindrance? There would have to
	be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order
	of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in
	which each couple meshed easy, predestined. Something they
	all heard with an extra sense atrophied in herself. She followed
	her partner's lead, limp in the young mute's clasp, waiting for
	the collisions to begin. But none came.
	CoL 49, PC 106/107

	Oedipa, a parodic everywoman of 1960s middle-class America,
	finds in this silent ballroom full of dancing couples a cultural
	formation to which she is alien - a system of communal order
	inside a seeming anarchy that occurs beyond her particular
	patterns of logic; the necessary collisions never occur.
	Additionally, this scene is emblematic of the paradox Oedipa
	herself becomes during the course of the text. an everywoman
	whose journey to the center of things is also a journey to the
	margins of possibility and to her own crisis of what "to believe
	in." To see how she arrives at this dual position, we must view
	Oedipa as the figure of transmission, the channel that will
	mediate the matrix of cultural information and memory that by
	conventional paradigms should be flowing from its source to its
	destination. We come to discover, however, that neither source
	nor destination are finite and that the messages transmitted
	refuse to resolve into a single meaning; instead, the messages
	disseminate fragments of meaning across a culture that has lost
	any totalizing mythology. As Anne Mangel has observed, "[t]he
	pursuit of meaning in language turns into a chimera throughout
	the novel as information constantly disintegrates through
	transmission."
	Bernard Duyfhuizen: "Hushing Sick Transmissions":
	Disrupting Story in the  Crying of Lot 49

	". . .you'll think I'm crazy, Oed. But I can do the same thing in
	reverse. Listen to anything and take it apart again. Spectrum
	analysis, in my head. I can break down chords, and timbres,
	and words too into all the basic frequencies and harmonics,
	with all their different loudnesses, and listen to them, each pure
	tone, but all at once." "How can you do that?"

	"It's like I have a separate channel for each one," Mucho said,
	excited, "and if I need more I just expand. Add on what I need. I
	don't know how it works, but lately I can do it with people talking
	too. Say 'rich, chocolaty goodness.'"

	"Rich, chocolaty, goodness," said Oedipa. "Yes," said Mucho,
	and fell silent. "Well, what?" Oedipa asked after a couple
	minutes, with an edge to her voice.
	CoL49, PC 116

	If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no
	proof against its magic, what else?