BtZ42: on the road to Greenwich

[Monte Davis]

A-and what if that dreaming fantasist-surrogate were an *unreliable
narrator*, eh? [insert Groucho business with eyebrows and cigar]

One reason I keep pulling at ontological threads is that Duyfhuizen's
"Starry-Eyed Semiotics" hit me like a truck in 1981. There's a big
difference between the version that >90% of GR summaries still use:

"Slothrop's erections/sexual encounters anticipate the location of every
V-2 strike, arousing the interest of a bunch of espionage and
psychological-warfare types"

,,,and "A bunch of spies and PR types *convince themselves* that Slothrop's
map proves that, although demonstrably it doesn't." For me, the latter
shifts my entire reading a considerable distance from "conspiracies in
history" toward a more Oedipa-like  "our need/fear of conspiracies, because
their absence is worse."

Which reminds me: the other day I pointed to Pirate's reading of the
V-mail, and joked about it being "tantamount to an order from the highest
levels." In fact, "there's a time given, a place, a request for help" -- so
in point of [fictional] fact, it seems to be a "pull me out" message from
Katje, who presumably slipped the message into (or had it slipped into) a
V-2 near the Hague. It's Pirate's own sense of duty to his people (what
John Le Carre would call an agent's "joes") that makes it tantamount to an
order -- which it isn't. I don't think there's any evidence either way to
show that SOE HQ concurs, or even knows the contents of the capsule.

Which suggests, in turn, the possibility that well before the emergence of
the Counterforce late in the novel, Pirate may be freelancing. And that for
all the IG Farben-Shell-GE linkages, for all the capitalized "They" and
"the Firm" and "the War," for everything in the book that encourages grand
unified paranoia,we might do well to be alert also for clues to
cross-conspiracies, failed conspiracies, and seeming conspiracies that
aren't.

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 4:25 PM, Ray Easton <raymond.lee.easton at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I am unsure how meaningful 'ontological questions' about fiction are in
> any case (and by this category I mean to include even such apparently
> straightforward questions as "How old is Gertie McDowell?"), but surely
> here, in a novel that begins with a dream dreamt (apparently) by a
> fantasist-surrogate, 'ontological questions' would seem to be especially
> difficult to answer.
>
> On March 25, 2016 3:10:55 PM Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >  GR has so many dreams, fantasies, and more or less
> > explicit hallucinations that the question "Did X 'really happen' or did
> > character Y imagine it?" doesn't carry the binary implications it does
> for
> > most fiction.
>
>
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> http://www.aqua-mail.com
>
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