IVIV20: No way to tell, 367-368

[Mark Kohut]

I like the old-fashioned 'fog' metaphor here....seems just right for this genre spin.........reminds of what TRP wrote
about 'rain' as ending metaphor, borrowed from Hemingway, he wrote, for one early story of his.

So, set in the past, IV--where the 'prophecy' [about ARPENET and the itnernet future,say] is after the fact, as Tore first remarked, I think,  and therefore not prophecy at all.......

So, fog can remind of 'fog of war', the fogginess of what is to come for Doc in his life and at that place...

Notice car is like an extraterrestial, doc is in a car as unanchored to space and time as is a pilot...a guy in a rocket?....only the speedometer
could tell him how fast he was going.....remember 'speed' in AtD...and GR?


--- On Sat, 1/30/10, Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com> wrote:

> From: Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com>
> Subject: IVIV20: No way to tell, 367-368
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Saturday, January 30, 2010, 11:20 AM
> And so, as the final section of the
> final chapter begins, we must, and not
> for the first time, infer continuity. Doc "watche[s]
> everything slowly
> disappear" (367). Cf the opening to Ch20, Doc "gaz[ing]
> into each image till
> one by one they began to float apart into little blobs of
> color" (351).
> Here, there is "no way to tell" what he is looking at
> (367). A reader
> without a text.
> 
> The rules of the convoy are familiar, "one of the few
> things he'd ever seen
> anybody in this town, except hippies, do for free" (368).
> Throughout, the
> narrative has scrutinised Doc's status; here, we see him
> confirmed as a
> regular citizen, no longer (merely) a hippie.
> 
>