GR translation: except that the man was never really alive

[Mike Jing]

That was my interpretation as well.  Thanks, Laura.



On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 6:28 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> But Pokler offers Slothrop first-hand memories of him, from the days when
> he was in Jamf's chemistry class, leading to one of my all-time favorite
> passages in GR, which starts (p. 587, truncated, because I hate typing):
>
> "In the last third of his life, there came over Laszlo Jamf ... a
> hostility, a strangely personal hatred of the covalent bond ..."
>
> First-hand memories, related in person, surpass mere mythologies. And
> Slothrop seems genuinely surprised that Jamf is dead. So I go with the
> interpretation that Jamf was never really alive in Slothrop's memories
> (though he's very alive in Pokler's memories).
>
> Laura
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Morris **
> Sent: Mar 10, 2013 4:54 PM
> To: alice wellintown **
> Cc: pynchon -l **
> Subject: GR translation: except that the man was never really alive
>
> Jamf as mythic being, apochrapha, boogeyman.
>
> He was never alive because he exists only in story.  His story, not he
> himself, is what has been living on.  Jamf can be dead, but not really,
> because he was never really alive.
>
> On Sunday, March 10, 2013, alice wellintown wrote:
>
>> In the postmodern critical haystack data days Jamf was employed as
>> bleed and noise to tout P's postmodern indeterminacy, his reader
>> trappings and mappings on to ambiguities multiplying. Though surely
>> paranoids, as proverbs for those thus inclined, from Odysseus, to
>> Hamlet to Alice in Wonderland to Dorothy in Oz, and all who have
>> feelings they may not be in Kansas or anyplace else on the map,
>> suspect that the real may be only a reel, film, a belief only a dream.
>> Difficult to translate....
>>
>> > I take this as Slothrop writing off or entertaining the idea of Jamf as
>> > merely a figment of his imagination--an attractive alternative to the
>> truth?
>> > Related to this (much) later mention of Jamf on p738?  Even though Jamf
>> is
>> > ostensibly a physically real entity, paranoia is just as much about
>> > suspicion of the real as it is belief in the unreal.
>> >
>> > "'There never was a Dr. Jamf,' opines world-renowned analyst Mickey
>> > Wuxtry-Wuxtry--'Jamf was only a fiction'"
>>
>  ******
>
>
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