GR Translation: she has lost her surface

[Mike Jing]

Thanks all.  Greatly appreciated.

On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 10:36 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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/?listpynchon-l
>
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