The Cry that might abolish the Night/: "Gesichter der Heiligen Krankheit"

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

"She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes 
is /supposed/ to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanency. 
But then she wondered if the gemlike 'clues' were only some kind of 
compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, 
the cry that might abolish the night." (The Crying of Lot 49, chapter five)

Just recently I found a great reader on epilepsy in literature that also 
contains samples from CoL 49.
Other authors that - along with two well informed introducing essays - 
can be found there are, in addition to sources from the Bible and the 
Koran, Aischylos, Platon, Aristoteles, Plutarch, Hildegard von Bingen, 
Dante Alighieri, Paracelsus, Shakespeare, Schiller, Büchner, Stendhal, 
Dostojewski, Zola, Thomas Mann, Hans Fallada, Raymond Chandler, Ken 
Kesey, Thomas Bernhard, Hubert Fichte, Mario Vargas Llosa, Umberto Eco, 
Kenzaburo Oe, Salman Rushdie and many - Wait a moment, gotta grab my 
Charles Dickens! - many more. Highly recommended!

"... She could at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as 
the epileptic is said to - an odour, colour, pure piercing grace note 
sounding his seizure. Afterwards it is only this signal, really dross, 
this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack 
[Grand-mal-seizures in serials, however, can - status epilepticus! - 
bring you to near-death-experiences that you /are/ able to remember 
afterwards.kfl], that he remembers. Oedipa wondered whether, at the end 
of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with 
only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never 
the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for 
her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own 
message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary 
world came back. In the space of a sip of dandelion wine it came to her 
that she would never know how many times such a seizure may already have 
visited, or how to grasp it should it visit again. Perhaps in this last 
second --- but there was no way to tell. She glanced down the corridor 
of Cohen's rooms in the rain and saw, for the very first time, how far 
it might be possible to get lost in this." (The Crying of Lot 49, 
chapter four)

Cf. *Gesichter der Heiligen Krankheit*. Die Epilepsie in der Literatur. 
Herausgegeben von Friederike Waller, Hans Dierck Waller und Georg 
Marckmann. Tübingen 2004: Klöpfer & Meyer; on pp. 223-225 you can find 
the given quotes, slightly extended, in German and completed with a 
short plot summary.

Let me, while we're at it, reintroduce an idea of mine about the 
novella's ending which I wrote about some years ago. One of the 
leitmotifs of CoL 49 is obviously Pentecost. When we look into the Bible 
to find out about its origin, we read there: "And when the day of 
Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place./ 
And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as a rushing mighty wind, 
and it filled all the house where they were sitting./ And there appeared 
unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them./ 
And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with 
other tongues, as the spirit gave them utterance" (KJB, Acts 2, 1-4). 
What is described here
if not - as least one /could/ observe it like that! - a collective 
epileptic seizure? The week has seven days and there are seven weeks 
between Easter and Pentecost. Do the multiplicative math and you don't 
have to look up the novella's last, well, Word. Or better: number. You 
may stone me, but at least our author has a soft spot for heresy. It's 
not about Christianity, mind you, "the legacy was America" (The Crying 
of Lot 49, chapter six), or, as we can amplify via Gravity's Rainbow, 
"the fork in the road America never took". Right after that Oedipa Maas 
asks herself: "(H)ad that been in the will, in code, perhaps without 
Pierce really knowing, having been by then too /seized/ [emphasis 
added.kfl.] by some lucid instruction?" Not exactly crystal-clear or 
someting, but in a strange or paradox or - to recall Gravity's Rainbow 
again - "ass backwards" way epilepsy seems to pop up here again, as also 
J. Kerry Grant has noted: "The novel's earlier references to epileptic 
seizures may provide the means for decoding this rather cryptic passage. 
Oedipa lists three possible causes for Pierce's lack of awareness of 
what is encrypted in his will: 'some headlong expansion of himself, some 
visit, some lucid instruction'. The serial nature of the syntax allows 
for the possibility that Oedipa is describing a sequence of 'events' 
that have taken place as a seizure. In this formulation, the will 
becomes the 'secular announcement', the 'compiled memories of clues, 
announcements, intimations' that is all that remains after the seizure 
[s.a.], and not 'the central truth itself' that is here represented by 
the 'lucid instruction' that is communicated to Pierce in a form of 
revelation, a 'visit'" (A Companion to /The Crying of Lot 49/. Athens 
1994: University of Georgia Press, pp. 135-6). Maybe one could bring 
more clarity into all this by doing research on how neurological 
dis-eases appear in general in Pynchon's work. I got, for instance, 
during my rereads of Inherent Vice from some dialogues the strong 
impression that Sportello suffers from some neurological problem that 
can not be reduced to his ganja smoking. Anyone out there who felt the 
same or can provide passages from other books by Pynchon? More 
interesting than the sheer medical aspect I find the epistemological 
implications like they shine up in The Crying of Lot 49 ~

And now we have here on Radio KCIF George Watsky with "Seizure Boy":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XVweyoy42Y

Enjoy!

Kai Frederik

"In Thomas Pynchon's Roman /Die Versteigerung von No 49/ wird die Aura 
als Stilmittel strukturell und inhaltlich in den Visionen der Hauptfigur 
des Textes verwendet. Die Hausfrau Oedipa Maas ist zur 
Testamentsvollstreckerin ihres früheren Liebhabers Pierce Inverarity 
eingesetzt. (...) Angesichts der Faszination und des Grauens ihres 
Erlebens stellt sich die Frage nach der Bedeutung des metaphorischen 
Spiels mit der Epilepsie in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem in der 
Realität unbeschreibbaren Bösen. (...) Der Epileptologe Peter Wolf 
entdeckt in der geheimnisvollen Verschlüsselung dieses Textes auch eine 
Verheißung für Epilepsiekranke, vermittelt sie doch faszinierende 
Erfahrungen in der Aura, die man in der Realität nicht ertragen könnte 
[--> P. Wolf: Epilepsie als Metapher in der zeitgenössischen Literatur. 
Epilepsie-Blätter 1994; 7, Suppl. 2, S. 31-35]". Friederike Waller und 
Hans Dierck Waller: Literarische Gesichter der 'Heiligen Krankheit'. 
Reisen ins Grenzgebiet, in: Waller/Waller/Marckmann a.a.O., pp. 15-29, 
here 27-8.


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