BtZ42 - The Book

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Jumping to the end of the section - p. 47:

"Spectro is one of the original seven owners of The Book, and if you ask Mr. Pointsman what Book, you'll only get smirked at."

Weisenburger is quick to identify The Book as volume 2 of Pavlov's Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes. He adds that the secrecy of rotating the book between various owners has no particular purpose, calling it "a bit of melodrama from the narrator."

My gut reaction is, fuck off, Weisenburger! Is there any textual justification for Weisenburger's explanation later in the book? There's certainly none here. It seems way too prosaic and non-Pynchonian an interpretation. Have I missed something?

I read The Book as deliberately obscure - an unholy book of (perhaps)lab data, meticulously and secretively collected, and given a mystically ritual connotation by its rotation among the various personalities of the White Visitation.

Laura
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l