BtZ42: on the road to Greenwich

Fri Mar 25 19:14:17 CDT 2016

Mapping the "Unmappable": Inhabiting the Fantastic Interface of 'Gravity's
Rainbow.'
By Noya, Jose Liste

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 7:28 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> Great post Monte.
> Where is the section, quite late in the book if I recall, where someone
> stumbles on Slothrop's map again and it's pretty explicitly stated that the
> markers don't (or don't all) refer to real encounters?
>
> And fair reading that the message is from Katje. Have there been other
> possibilities mooted? Seems a lot of plot and detail early in the novel for
> that loose end to remain so.
>
> On Sat, Mar 26, 2016 at 9:53 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> According to my trusty source, Wikipedia, Ontology is a branch of
>> metaphysics that often deals in Being and Becoming, Existence and Reality.
>>
>> AND
>>
>> In what may be said to Exist
>>
>> And
>>
>> In what may be said to be Real.
>>
>> According to smart critics like J Kerry Grant, P has made it his business
>> to call into question the expectations of readers, who are, conservative in
>> these expectations, and to question the epistemological expectations that
>> inform such expectations.
>>
>> Way back in 1987 when Brian McHale took a stab at Postmodernist Fiction,
>> he jumped into a giant cognitive soup of questions that he has since, with
>> Constructing Postmodernism (1992) and with several brilliant studies of
>> Pynchon and lots of others who write this kind of fiction, mastered.
>>
>> Who is to be master.
>>
>> Humpty or Pynchon.
>>
>> Don't say both/and please.
>>
>> Holding my nose for the deep dive into the book again and hoping I'm made
>> a fool of once more.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 6:43 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> You say: "rather than of Pirate taking part in an ongoing Osmotic
>>> fantasy, which strikes me as more likely in context."
>>>
>>> My first inclination is to agree with that.
>>>
>>> Also re Gogol's Nose there is that line on 14: "not even an Arab With A
>>> Big Greasy Nose to perform on"
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 3:09 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Yes -- and I hadn't known until reading that Wikipedia entry that an
>>>> early version of The Nose did frame the story as Kovalyov's dream.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks to Mark Kohut for helping me think through the timeline and the
>>>> status of the Adenoid. 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. Still, Pynchon puts so much into the fine shading and grading
>>>> among them that it seems worth tracing.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail&utm_term=oa-2115-v2-b> Virus-free.
>>>> www.avast.com
>>>> <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail&utm_term=oa-2115-v2-b>
>>>> <#m_-2634190739942868061_m_4229685569858493824_m_2943774785951760415_m_3705780438457579400_DDB4FAA8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 12:56 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> > And Gogol's Nose:
>>>>> >
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Critics note that the story's title in Russian (Нос, "Nos") is the
>>>>> reverse of the Russian word for "dream" (Сон, "Son").
>>>>>
>>>>> > On Mar 25, 2016, at 12:22 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>> >
>>>>> > After the banana breakfast, Pirate sets out for the V-2 impact site
>>>>> on p. 11, but won't get there and collect his mail until p. 20. In between,
>>>>> we get mostly -- but not entirely -- flashbacks:
>>>>> >
>>>>> > (11) Rumanian royalist's fantasy: Wartime London was home to Eastern
>>>>> European governments-in-exile from the Baltic states south to the Balkans,
>>>>> and it was not clear in late 1944 which might be re-installed after the
>>>>> war, or at least used as bargaining chips with the Soviets who were
>>>>> overrunning that territory. This seems to be more or less "real time"
>>>>> >
>>>>> > (13) memory (date indeterminate) of the tramp, Girl Guides, and
>>>>> "sizzling night"
>>>>> >
>>>>> > (13-14) memory from 1935 of Loaf's fantasy, the Moslem Messiah --
>>>>> which alerted the Firm to Pirate's talent
>>>>> >
>>>>> > (14-16) "At last, one proper Sherlock Holmes London evening" -- date
>>>>> after 1935, but indeterminate -- the Adenoid, an outgrowth of Foreign
>>>>> Office Balkan specialist Blatherard Osmo. This sequence ends with Osmo's
>>>>> mysterious death in 1939, so the "2 1/2 years" Pirate spent in daily visits
>>>>> to the Adenoid were within the 1935-1939 span... IF, that is, this
>>>>> recollection is of "real time" rather than of Pirate taking part in an
>>>>> ongoing Osmotic fantasy, which strikes me as more likely in context.
>>>>> >
>>>>> > I doubt it's coincidence that this sequence goes from the Rumanian
>>>>> hint at "what will happen after WWII" to the senior diplomats' fears of
>>>>> "Balkan Armageddon," i.e. a replay of WWI's origin in Serbia (cf. also
>>>>> Against the Day).
>>>>> >
>>>>> > So... why an adenoid (i.e. a tonsil), rather than an appendix or
>>>>> spleen or hypothalamus? Why human tissue at all, rather than some other
>>>>> stand-in for Osmo's fears? Its slimy protoplasmic aspect led me on first
>>>>> reading to think of SF movies:
>>>>> >
>>>>> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blob
>>>>> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Master_X-7
>>>>> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quatermass_II
>>>>> >
>>>>> > And its _sshhlop_ing of the troops is parodically close to a scene
>>>>> of the Martian death ray in Wells' The War of the Worlds.
>>>>> >
>>>>> > All I got -- not much -- is a vague association of the "adenoidal"
>>>>> voice with a nasal drawl allegedly common among the UK twits and toffs who
>>>>> might have populated the Foreign Office in those days. Still around under
>>>>> new management:
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/that-adenoidal-nasally-geek-voice
>>>>> >
>>>>> > And Gogol's Nose:
>>>>> >
>>>>> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nose_(Gogol_short_story)
>>>>>
>>>>> -
>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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