BtZ42: on the road to Greenwich

[Mark Kohut]

page 11.
This seems the place where we can't leave Pirate's possible freelancing
without pointing out how
Pynchon, surprisingly, has him hit spontaneously--possessively, in the gut,
by a feeling of solitude and self-distancing
from his mates.

Alienation from a group, a psychological precondition for freelancing---and
an early P clue?

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 6:27 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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