V-2nd - Chapter 16 - Events Seem To Be Ordered Into An Ominous Logic

[Michael Bailey]

kelber wrote:
> Really sorry!  I've completely fizzled in my hosting for this final chapter.  I've been preoccupied with a lot of personal stuff - much of it good.
>

not to worry,
glad to hear that it's good, that is...

> Some thoughts, though, about the phrase.
>

> Stencil's repetition of it, stressing various words, is a dry run for GR's Kenosha Kid sequence.


hey, yes, that's right!

>
> Why is Stencil so freaked by hearing Father Fairing's name in a second, but related context?  It's a very 20th century reaction.
>

I think maybe he's freaking because he just realized that Profane (I
started to type "Pynchon" (-;)) is the one who shot him in the butt!
and then he gets paranoid because he - even knowing Profane is a total
schlemihl and couldn't possibly be connected with anything sinister
(could he?)...he thinks that maybe Profane IS indeed part of the plot

(remember how he was telling somebody - Rachel? - on the phone after
he got shot in the sewer how "they" are after him?  mostly he's
obsessed with V. but he's got this paranoid streak that doesn't come
out very often)


> From my admittedly non-comprehensive knowledge of 19th century lit, it seems that coincidence is not only tolerated, but expected.  Jane Eyre happens to be taken in my some nice people who happen to be her cousins; The man who molested Raskolnikov's sister happens to be staying next door to the prostitute Sonya and happens to hear Raskolnikov's confession; etc. etc.
>


> Coincidence is OK in the 19th century, because there's a benevolent God pulling the strings.  In the 20th century, there's no God, so coincidence means [well, to readers and movie-goers it means a stupid, contrived plot] to Stencil that there's an Ominous Logic controlled by whom? The British Foreign Office?  V. herself?  Some weird force of history that coughs up both coincidence and V?
>

hmm, I run into coincidences all the time in what passes for my life,
doesn't everybody? if (with more than a little regret on my part) we
completely Biz-Bag (remember that ad?) the concept of God (which in
the 19th century - a-and even later than that - had several fairly
attractive formulations) then for the attractive center of our thought
instead taking something like a nucleus of
Heisenberg/Goedel/Wittgenstein, still it's all about the observer and
language - that is to say, if you assign meaning to something then
it's meaningful, and what is a coincidence but a random event that for
no particular reason has some meaning? so that if something makes you
prick up your ears in Manhattan and then you hear it in Malta, that's
the kind of thing a sensorium is prone to do

> In GR, this dread of formerly benevolent coincidence is personified as Them.  The military-industrial complex has taken over for God; death from above comes not from God, but from The Bomb.  All of that great stuff is born in Stencil's nightmares.
>

yeah, Stencil isn't just about V., he does have a touch of that paranoia too!



-- 
"The general agreement is that language should be a kind of honey.  I
like it to be a kind of speed." - Michael Moorcock