Re: GR translation: better, then, “like a noose”

[alice wellintown]

> Pudding decides the noose metaphor might only be taken seriously by the
> political war chaps. He needs to ironicize it.

An odd passage. We don't often say "change like a noose." We say,
"tighten like a noose" or "close in like a noose" or some such that
suggests someone of something is caught and in time will be
terminated.

How does a noose change? It tightens if it is threatening or limiting
one's options. It may be loosened if a threat is relaxed or if one's
options (out of it) are increased.

Pudding, here, is in a new space of battlefields where the front
changes. OK, makes sense. If it is like a noose, we can assume that it
is tightening or loosening. Or, I guess, that "like a noose" is a
simile that suggests a rope that may be tightening and loosening and
also shifting and changing its shape.

That Pynchon inserts a second simile ("like the gold-lit boarders of
consciousness") and then a third simile ("like them" and P italicizes
but does not capitalize the word "them") makes matters rather muddy if
not shitty for translators.

The issue is made more muddy with the use of dashes, parenthesis,
ellipses and other marks of omission, quotation marks, and, of course,
the free indirect style. The last makes the passage lean against the
gold-lit boarders of consciousness, Pudding's, which is, naturally, at
his age, a bit of broken remembrancer, and paranoid to boot.

The narrator, sharing in Pudding's paranoia, and more paranoid than
Pudding, plays a familiar tune, foreshadowing Pudding's "hanging" and
hammering away at the novel's major theme: the shifting War-State and
the fear that They/Them control it. Of course, They don't, but the
noose shifts nonetheless. Maybe it's all just paranoia? Like a noose.