not reversible

[alice wellintown]

The rockets, the terror they bring, are
not reversible. Thus the Rocket, instrument of loss and discontinuity,
also serves as a reminder of the impossibility of return, and the fatal
absurdity of narrative causality. On the other hand, it is paranoia, the
inability to accept discontinuity, that turns the mechanics of a supersonic
explosion into a conscious mockery of the abstraction “return.”

"Bouncy Little Tunes": Nostalgia, Sentimentality, and Narrative
in Gravity's Rainbow
Attewell, Nadine.
Contemporary Literature, Volume 45, Number 1, Spring 2004,
pp. 22-48 (Article)

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 5:58 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Oedipa later reflects back on the "massive destructions of
> information" essential to the Nefastis machine, and discovers this
> "irreversible process" of erasure herself (128). She conceives of the
> destruction of memory in the recycled bed of an old dying alcoholic
> sailor: "So when this mattress flared up around the sailor, in his
> Viking's funeral: the stored, coded years of uselessness, early death,
> self-harrowing, the sure decay of hope, the set of all men who had
> slept on it, whatever their lives had been, would truly cease to be,
> forever, when the mattress burned" (128). This irreversible
> destruction of memory, emerges again as Oedipa considers that the
> Tristero could be Pierce Inverarity's attempt to escape erasure: "he
> might even have tried to survive death, as a paranoia; as a pure
> conspiracy against someone he loved" (179). Perhaps, the entire story
> of COL 49 is the struggling memory (if Pierce indeed left this great
> conspiracy to torment Oedipa) of a dead man, desperate to endure
> annihilation.
>
> http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/entropy/col2.html
>
> see
> Hysteron Proteron in
> Gravity's Rainbow
> Steven Weisenburger