BtZ42: on the road to Greenwich

[Smoke Teff]

Monte, this is great reading. Thanks a lot.

I think you're right to point out the different effects of the two
summaries of the book. It wouldn't be Pynchon if either summary were really
correct, or anywhere near enough.

The question of whether such distinctions matter, can be known...whether we
should be chasing down these threads...it in chasing them, or keeping an
eye out for them (a paranoid one), wondering if we should be keeping an eye
out for them, become disoriented, that maybe the book transcends its
structure--the sum of its parts--goes beyond *that *zero--and achieves its
effect.

Which is to make people actually feel what *49 told* people Oedipa felt.

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 5:27 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>>
>>
>> Sent with AquaMail for Android
>> http://www.aqua-mail.com
>>
>
>
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