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

[Erik T. Burns]

"Saint Paul was an epileptic"

--The Recognitions, p 488

On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 2:54 PM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> "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.
>
>