GR translation: with edges fine and combed as rain

[alice wellintown]

That's not what I said. One can juxtapose opposites (with simile,
metaphor, images, etc.) for effect. For example, the ocean is like a
desert. Also, this is one of the many ways we use irony. So, if my
husband calls me a brilliant scientist because I just figured out that
my car runs better when filled with gasoline, he is offering a
left-handed compliment; he is speaking ironically.

The problem with the passage in question is not the word "combed" or
the image or the comparisons or allusions Pynchon piles up. The
problem is the us of "as" before a colon to make these complete. I
doesn't work.

Believe me, I have no difficulty visualizing Pynchon's prose. If I did
I would not read him. So the image is not hard for me to see. Bu the
word "as" makes the passage, not ambiguous, but unreadable. This is, I
presume, why the translator is having such difficulty with it. It has
nothing to do with the images, the comparisons or use of figurative
language, simile, metaphor, etc, but with the use of that little word.
And, as I stated previously, its use has been troublesome for some
time, so it is often discussed in standard and non-standard grammar
books. The passage, makes extensive use of the subjunctive. The use of
the subjunctive is quite important to  Pynchon's style (his connective
style, as one critic notes), and it connects him with the romantic
tradition in American Fiction, as Tanner demonstrates in his wonderful
book _The American Mystery_.

American Englishes include these:

He spoke of these things like or as it didn't much matter to him.
He spoke of these things as if it didn't much matter to him.

P's tendency is to use the second sentence.

I maintain it is a editor's oversight. Is "Suggenthal" a typo too?

On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 6:18 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you contend that juxting opposites in a simile is rare, I'd like to start
> a blog about such.  I contend that it is rampant.
>
>
> On Saturday, March 16, 2013, alice wellintown wrote:
>>
>> A simile, such as the one you've provided, is a type of metaphor, in
>> this case the simile is constructed with "as", though it can be made
>> with "like' as well, and without either.
>>
>> Though most students are taught that a simile always uses one or the
>> other, this is false.
>>
>> The comparison is all that is needed.
>>
>> A non-simile metaphor or a metaphor that is not a similie will not
>> make the comparison but the claim, so if we take your example and
>> apply it to me,  thus, "Alice is a box of rocks", we see that it is
>> not  a matter of obscurity but of effect.
>>
>> The former, yours, is surely more obscure, for it compares two
>> un-alike things as it wedges "as" or "like" betwixt them.
>>
>> And, as "as" and "like" are given grammar's conscriptive usage, and
>> this obscures both from the vulgar tongue we are used to using, this
>> compounds, not obscures the matter.
>>
>> The matter, as Hamlet tells Polonius, is words, words, words.
>>
>> Nothing, as far as we know, is more prone to abscure turdity
>> scatalogically,  than words.
>>
>>
>>
>> > Dumb as a box of rocks.
>> >
>> > Metaphor.
>> >
>> > Why make this obscure?