GR translation: except that the man was never really alive

[Bekah]

And apparently Jamf has a grave:   (P264)

"They have vice presidents whose only job is to observe the ritual of going out every Sunday to spit on old Jamf's grave." 
>>>
“Wait a minute. . . .”Jamf dead? “You say Jamf’s grave, now?” It ought to be making more of a difference to him, except that the man was never really alive so how can he be really—

 "Up in the mountains,  toward the Uetliberg."  

Bekah

On Mar 10, 2013, at 3:28 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'"