GR Translation: she has lost her surface

[alice malice]

I think T.S. Eliot is the key to understanding this allusive parable
(GR.537-548),  and, thus, the  details, the words, etc.  that a
translator needs to focus on. While I agree with David and Ricky, it's
difficult to know, without reading a passage in translation, or what
the translator has done with the rest of the episode, what one word
means or conveys, or as is often the case with GR, evokes from a
reader through allusion, figurative language and so forth.

In any event, the very useful Companion of Weisenburger numbers this
parable Episode 24 and provides a good start on the Thomas Gospel
allusion here, and others have written about this epigraph, the magic
nationalism and youthful piety, cult followings, a common enough
target of Pynchon's satire of the 60's youth, etc,  but it is to the
question the episode begins with, Who would have thought...so many...?
an allusion to Eliot's Wasteland, that I would turn to if I wanted to
translate the language here. Eliot is the source, the parody is of
Prufrock, and, as mentioned, The Wasteland, and the allusions are
linked, therefore, to Eliot's allusion to Dante.

In any even, this is the dance of faces and masks, masques....and I
like Ricky's water reading, one could say water or soap bubbles
even....



Prufrock's paralysis follows naturally from this subjectivizing of
everything. If each consciousness is an opaque sphere, then Prufrock
has no hope of being understood by others. "No experience," says
Bradley in a phrase Eliot quotes, "can lie open to inspection from
outside" (KE, 203). Prufrock's vision is incommunicable, and whatever
he says to the lady will be answered by, "That is not what I meant at
all./That is not it, at all" (CP, 6). The lady is also imprisoned in
her own sphere, and the two spheres can never, like soap bubbles,
become one. Each is impenetrable to the other.

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/prufrock.htm

On Thu, Jan 1, 2015 at 8:11 PM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com> wrote:
> V545.30-38  She only raises her eyebrows. It was a shitty thing to say.
> Remorse, or some late desire to be pure, rush into his blood like dope.
>        “But—” astonished to feel himself beginning to collapse, like a stack
> of rifles, around her feet, caught in her gravitation, distances abolished,
> waveforms unmeasurable, “Katje . . . if I could never betray you—”
>        He has fallen: she has lost her surface. She is staring at him amazed
>        “Even if the price for that were . . . betraying others, hurting . .
> . or killing others—then it wouldn’t matter who, or how many, no, not if I
> could be your safety, Katje, your perfect—”
>
> What does "she has lost her surface" mean?
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l