V--2nd, Existentialist Sheriff; Profane reading, Pig Bodine recommended, p. 302 HP Classics edition

[alice wellintown]

Gotcha, Katje, catch, catch, catch, 22...the film gotcha
22 scidoo you pervert
 you do not do
you do knot doo rag sick crew


Katje, as she has always been, is "part of the ash-colored
web."

She discovers a can of film in what was a music room, the harpsichord
no one played, now disintegrating.

This instrument belongs to The House of the Seven Gables & to Alice

“A great many times, she had been heard playing sadly and beautifully
on the harpsichord” when a member of the Pyncheon race shook hands
with death"


No music, but music is for the reader, Katje, as always, is for the
Oven. Pointy is off to London, lunch with his industrialists
again. Has he forgotten Katje? Is she free? Out of the
emptiness of "The White Visitation she finds a projector,
loads the film and watches. She recognizes the mediaeval
rooms before she recognizes her own projected image-a
white-haired girl in Pirate Prentice's Chelsea maisonette.
She is a bit surprised, when did they record this, she
thinks for a moment, ah yes, hard to remember, all those
roles, so much ash, but she remembers that it was when Osbie
Feel was processing the Amanita mushrooms.

That would be Episode 14 (a very difficult and important
episode, one of the long spirals--- from Katje in mirrors
and film into the center, mirrored time, SW Africa,
solipsistic history, Blicero, and out of the center back to
Katja,  Nowhere, where the secret cameraman, hidden from
her, followed her deliberate movements nowhere, she touches
the paper in the oven as if she is touching her own skin,
the oven door is closed, but not for her, for Katje the Oven
will never close. The windows, melting rain, gray, Katje,
charcoal-saturated, defined. She has posed before the mirror
too often, seen all her life in mirrors, her own studied
mannequin's stare, she feels the cameraman's pleasure and
she knows that she is corruption and ashes, "she belongs as
none can guess cruelly to the Oven…to Der Kinderofen…"



Osbie Feel prefers certain films.  What has happened in the
world of film and finance? Ufa, erratic funding, only one
film projector, a black film…  Gerhardt von Goll, "once an
intimate and still the equal of Lang, Pabst, Lubitsch, more
lately meshed in with the affairs of any number of exile
governments, fluctuations in currencies, the establishment
and disestablishment of an astonishing network of market
operations winking on, winking off across the embattled
continent…customers fall smothered like bugs in the presence
of Flit, but von Goll still has the touch, he proclaims the
film his greatest work, Prettyplace agrees, though for
different reasons than von Goll might have given or even
from his peculiar vantage foreseen.

 What on earth did they use that film for? Some conditioned reflex.

Spliced on at the end is Osbie's "Doper's Greed. The film,
with too many personalities, with Pointy and Feel and a
midget Sheriff/plot. Katje can't make it out, it could be
this or that, prophetic, kindness, so on, but again, her
Politics or lack of Politics, her Solipsistic history
betrays her, the counterforce arises Dialectically (all
Dialectics are doomed in GR), but the reader is not Katje or
the counterforce.

Eliot:

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/tradition.htm


 Maybe my post on the Grammar of Science (Adams)  will show up yet.

"The world is everything that is the case."

		--Wittgenstein

P, I suspect, aside from the fact that Ludwig was popular
cant at the Rusty Spoons and Gin Mills around the Village,
was attracted to the Objective Perspective of Wittgenstein,
as much as to his Existentialism, but the Existentialism is
parodic in P's first novel, and later, P will make clear,
that his reality is Substrative, the Virgin/Rock, under the paving stones.

"We never get away from ourselves. Not I only do I see that
I can not get away from myself, but I see that you cannot
get away from yourself...It was my original intention to
present my analysis of doings or happenings exclusively in
the first person singular, the doings or happenings being
doings by me or happenings to me. "

		--Percy W. Bridgman



It is given the most beautiful expression possible by the American:

"I celebrate myself and Sing myself."

		--Whitman


To this, of course we open the door into the postmodern, and
language,  although I agree with McHale and Weisenburger and others who
claim that GR is P's first Postmodernist novel.


G. E. Moore,

...the problems of philosophy are not scientific, but "the
problem of trying to get really clear as to what on earth a
given philosopher MEANT by something which he said."

Rudolph Carnap,

in his Logical Syntax of Language,

"Only then will it be possible to
replace traditional philosophy by a strict scientific
discipline, namely, that of the logic of science as the
syntax of the language of science."

At which point I surrender, after feeling a bit like Mr.
Graves and  Katje (Oedipa)  in GR, who discovers a film about a plot and
midget Sheriff.

"The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of
fiction."

		--Oakley Hall





On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 12:28 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I have been thinking about this joke in V. I'm making myself laugh.
>
> Existentialist---"existence comes before essence" was one shorthand I learned
> back in the day. We simply are
> what we choose, always freely, to do; I am not defined by any qualities I am..
>
> So, free doers who choose to be sheriffs, what's that about? Another little
> early Pynchon joke about authority
> corralling the outlaw spirit, free as existence?
>
> Is High Noon about an existentialist sheriff???
>
> Associations any and all....what comes to your mind?
>
>
>
>