Free? What's free?

[David Morris]

GR is a masterpiece!

On Tuesday, May 27, 2014, Doc Sportello <coolwithdoc at gmail.com> wrote:

> Right on thanks. Folks are not wrong about this book, it's excellent, glad
> I'm finally getting around to reading it.
> On May 27, 2014 3:15 AM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis49 at gmail.com<javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','montedavis49 at gmail.com');>>
> wrote:
>
>> Good reading, good questions. Yes, you are intended to be in doubt:
>>
>> 1: whether Slothrop has really escaped the control of the White
>> Visitation group, or pinballed on to the next phase of their plan
>> 2: WTF "free" even means, given all he's learned at the Casino about his
>> own past and its intertwining with the agendas of the Zone.
>>
>> That moment in the Rue Rossini is the starting point of Herman &
>> Weisenburger's excellent _GR, Domination, and Freedom_, and that question
>> its epigraph. As you keep the moment in mind, keep also that moment three
>> pages earlier:
>>
>> "Just for the knife-edge, here in the Rue Rossini, there comes to
>> Slothrop the best feeling dusk in a foreign city can bring: just where the
>> sky’s light balances the electric lamplight in the street, just before the
>> first star, some promise of events without cause, surprises, a direction
>> at right angles to every direction his life has been able to find up till
>> now."
>>
>> Maybe that's just a glimmer of Jiminy Cricket optimism, dopey Tyrone
>> setting himself up for another pratfall. Maybe.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 4:18 PM, Doc Sportello <coolwithdoc at gmail.com<javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','coolwithdoc at gmail.com');>
>> > wrote:
>>
>>> "It dawns on Slothrop, literally, through the yellowbrown window shade,
>>> that this is his first day Outside. His first free morning. He doesn't have
>>> to go back. Free? What's free? He falls asleep at last. A little before
>>> noon a young woman lets herself in with a passkey and leaves him the
>>> papers. He is now an English war correspondent named Ian Scuffling."
>>>
>>> Plot question (I know right?). Am I supposed to assume Waxwing etc. are
>>> with PISCES etc. or in opposition? Or am I supposed to be confused as I am?
>>>
>>> Side note. That paragraph reminded me a lot of Bleeding Edge especially
>>> when I read this on the next page:
>>>
>>> "The War has been reconfiguring time and space into it's own image. The
>>> track runs in different networks now. What appears to be destruction is
>>> really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he can
>>> only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading edges
>>> of..."
>>>
>>> On one hand Slothrop is free from "The White Visitation" but is now
>>> vulnerable to some other, greater, might-as-well-be cosmic threat. His
>>> freedom is a paradox since it seems to tend him toward another structuring.
>>> The War, like the Internet, is not just destruction and chaos, it's being
>>> kneaded, potentially to create whatever They want. Indeed "What is free?"
>>>
>>
>>
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