BtZ42: on the road to Greenwich

Fri Mar 25 19:22:52 CDT 2016

Understanding Difficulty: Reader Response and Cognition Across Genres

by

Julie Anne Rona Parisien

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 8:14 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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_-1735379206483797597_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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