GR Translation: she has lost her surface

[alice malice]

Yes, so at 546.12-13, They are touching now, without urgency, still,
neither of them, quite over the surprise....

Much has been written about Pynchon's characters, how they are shot
onto stages from the wings, are particles in collision, how time and
space collapse into light, a wave(?), and characters collide like so
many particles, so many....
Who would have thought, so many....

But here there is stillness.

So much has been written about stillness, Entropy, and Pynchon entropy
and the like, but here, because PP and K are, with all puns intended,
involved in medium, in exchange, and the body, sexual exchanges, so  I
would recommend Jeffery Severs's Corrupted Pilgrim's Guide, his own on
Women and Capitalism in AGTD.

Jeffrey Severs, “‘The abstractions she was instructed to embody’:
Women, Capitalism, and Artistic Representation in Against the Day,”
Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide, eds. Jeffrey
Severs and Christopher Leise (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2011) 232.



On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 9:02 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l