V--2nd, half-way

[Robin Landseadel]

Oh, I'm sorry, I must have confused the issue.

I'm not Cabalistically pursuing any numerological meaning in the  
number of the page* or concerned with the exact word count that would  
produce the exact center of the book. I know some commentators have  
gone so far to do such things. I pretty much am looking for the center  
of the story, I'm not taking it any further than that.

My point is that the "dead center" of "V." reads like something out of  
Gravity's Rainbow. So much that is important in these scenes is  
important to Gravity's Rainbow as well. That's one of my biggest  
takeaways from this group read, so far -- how much GR and "V." have in  
common in this chapter. If someone is gazing into the intense darkness  
at the core of Gravity's Rainbow, one might become a touch entranced  
by that  darkness, and chapter nine of "V." is about as close as were  
going to get to that feeling in any other book by any writer, Pynchon  
included.

On Oct 18, 2010, at 12:43 PM, David Morris wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 2:14 PM, Robin Landseadel
> <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>> I'm taking the page count of my copy -- the Harper Perennial Modern  
>> Classics edition -- and dividing by two.
>
> At which point you proceed to completely ignore Rich's point:
>
>>> but the original novel was 492 pgs making pg. 246 the middle, no?
>
> Restating the point:  Wouldn't the original page-count be the
> "significant" one, assuming the author intended any significance to a
> mid-point point?  Obviously he had no way of knowing what future
> edition pagination would be, so isn't your mid-point thesis severely
> undercut unless you use the first-edition versions of each?  And even
> then, there's no way Pynchon could have known how the pagination would
> play out, unless he specifically indicated how to lay out the printed
> pages.
>
> David Morris

*I'd say that's much more applicable to "Against the Day."