BtZ42 - The Book

[Monte Davis]

I don't think we disagree at all that the "involved social practice"
surrounding the Book is more than pointless ornament.

I don't think there's any question at all about what book it is.

On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 6:12 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> Yet still. Laura's thesis that The Book is "given a mystically ritual
> connotation by its rotation among the various personalities of the White
> Visitation" seems to be rather confirmed than falsified by the episode
> you're quoting from. This social practice respectively context is as
> important as the source text itself. There are Pointsman's marginalia, the
> mysterious origin of the copy, the secrecy of its use, the occasionally
> religious character of the debates - "'Pierre Janet --- sometimes the man
> talked like an Oriental mystic. (...)'/'I don't want to get into a
> religious debate with you (...), but I wonder ...'" (p. 88) -, plus the
> motto of the episode, making fun of authentic sources in general:
>
> "Better behave yourself or we'll send you back to Dr. Jamf!
>
> When Jamf conditioned *him*, he threw away the stimulus.
>
> Looks like Dr. Jamf's been by to see *your* little thing today, hasn't he?
>
>      --- *Neil Nosepicker's Book of 50,000 Insults*,
>                                 §6.72, 'Awful Offspring,'
>                                 The Nayland Smith Press,
>                                 Cambridge (Mass.), 1933"
>
> (p. 83, Picador/Viking)
>
> And then Pavlov died in 1936, while the action here takes place in 1944.
> In the meantime, science, due to the war, started to become big science.
> With the rise of the Rocket, and its societal implications
> ("Raketenstadt"), the rules of research are changing: Roger "feels the
> foundation of that discipline [statistics] trembling, a bit now, deeper
> than oddity ought to drive. Odd, odd, odd---think of the word: such white
> finality in its closing clap of tongue. It implies moving past the
> tongue-stop---beyond the zero---and into the other realm. Of course you
> don't move past. But you do realize, intellectually, that's how you
> *ought* to be moving." (p. 85). And Ivan Pavlov - "(h)e was realistic
> enough not to expect it [the true mechanical explanation] in his lifetime.
> Or in several lifetimes more. But his hope was for a long chain of better
> and better approximations" (p. 89) - appears, all of sudden, pretty
> outmoded in the shining new light of Raketenstadt.
>
> So yes, Weisenburger is correct in identifying The Book as volume 2 of
> Pavlov's lectures on conditioned reflexes. But his characterization of the
> involved social practice as "having no particular purpose" and "a bit of
> melodrama from the narrator" raises doubts whether he really thought the
> issue through. To identify a source is not the same as understanding its
> use by the author. And of course, The Book (note the caps!) does also refer
> to the Bible. The missing link here is "shit, money, and the Word" (p. 28)
> ...
>
>
>
> On 27.04.2016 09:21, Monte Davis wrote:
>
> LK> Is there any textual justification for Weisenburger's explanation
> later in the book?
>
>
> pp. 87-88 (Viking):
>
>
> "Pointsman has been talking about paranoia and the “idea of the opposite.”
> He has scribbled in The Book exclamation points and *how true*s all about
> the margins of Pavlov’s open letter to Janet concerning the *sentiments
> d'emprise*, and of Chapter LV, “An Attempt at a Physiological
> Interpretation of Obsessions and of Paranoia”—he can’t help this bit of
> rudeness, although the agreement among the seven owners was not to mark
> up The Book—it was too valuable for that sort of thing, they’d had to put
> in a guinea apiece. It was sold him on the sly, in the dark, during a
> Luftwaffe raid (most existing copies had been destroyed in their
> warehouse early in the Battle of Britain). Pointsman never even saw the
> seller’s face, the man vanishing into the hoarse auditory dawn of the
> all‑clear, leaving the doctor and The Book, the dumb sheaf already heating
> up, moistening in his tight hand . . . yes it might have been a rare work
> of erotica, certainly that coarse hand‑set look to the type . . . the
> crudities in phrasing, as if Dr. Horsley Gantt’s odd translation were in
> cipher, the plaintext listing shameful delights, criminal transports..."
>
>
> If there's another book combining that letter to Janet, that Chapter LV
> title, that translator, and that history of the first printing, I'm all
> ears.
>
> On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 1:09 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>> 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
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>
>
>
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