GR Translation: she has lost her surface

[Mark Kohut]

Surface here, per the masque talk, seems also to connote that her face
mask has dropped off; she is pure vulnerability (amazed). Coming after
"He has fallen" one has the image of him breaking the placid surface
of a lake, I think. He has fallen into her.

On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 8:32 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Unreal City,
>         Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
>         A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
>         I had not thought death had undone so many." - The Waste Land 60-64
>
> So Pynchon's question is answered by Eliot and Dante and a string of allusions.
>
> https://sites.google.com/site/eliotanddante/thewasteland
>
> On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 8:25 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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/?listpynchon-l
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