GRDP Day 5 - pg 139 (pace +14)
Five days in and feeling strong.
I've got to take a new picture of my book, because my tagging system is totally out of control. It's something that I developed when I started teaching at Iowa, using those little postit flags to mark my marginalia in the text. I would markup a book, and then arrive at the head of the classroom to find it almost impossible to relocate the passages i wanted to call attention to. The flags work miracles in this regard - so I'd like to make this shoutout to the good people of 3M for this awesome innovation.
I've been flagging a few things. The sad fact is that my system is evolving as I work my way into the text, so the color codes (almost wrote color coeds, which would be much more interesting. Grad school flashback?) are not totally consistent (what is with my parentheticals these days?).
RED - Started out as just a flag for swooping word acrobatics, but then I realized that I was mostly marking shit/decay/composting/palimpsest passages. So those are marking out that theme (almost wrote "making out" maybe "making out with colored coeds").
BLUE - Paranoia & "Deep Structure." The idea that there are agendas and forces at work larger than the supposed rationales for the war. The idea of the Firm, of opposites, of the space b/w One and Zero... the forces that are acting on the actors of the narrative. Beyond this, I'm looking for a basic schema that describes the centripetal and centrifugal forces acting on the narrative. Some of these forces, like death, are overdetermined, sometimes creating chaos and disorder, in other places enforcing an almost crystalline fascist hyperstructure.
GREEN - Capitalism. This is really a subset of the Blue schema hunt. But as readers of Against the Day will note, Pynchon has a particular axe to grind with the growth of transnational market forces as the primary organizing schema for the human enterprise in the 20th century. Its not a coincidence that he is beginning this interrogation at the parabolic height of the second world war, in particular fixating on the sort of systems logic creating a self-organizing ecosystem around the robot bomb of the V2.
ORANGE - Words I have never, never heard of. The winner this week? Ctenophile - a perverse lover of combs. Can't imagine why I hadn't run across that one before.
There is one more big idea I want to write about, something that I've been seeing with a formal clarity that I missed the first couple go-rounds i've had with GR. That idea is Free Indirect Discourse (or as our German brothers might say, "freie indirekte Gedankenwiedergabe." In fact, a more accurate description of this might be Floating Free Indirect Discourse.
Basically, yes, GR is narrated in the 3rd person voice. We have the solid anchor point of the authorial voice, that intellect that seems to be standing orthogonal to the history of the narrative "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now." The ordering mind of GR is speaking these words, the same intellect that placed that Von Braun epigraph, "Nature does not know extinction..."
But intermixed with the oblate god (small g intended) of the narrator there are so many other voices. This is hell and hell is other people. Nature does not seem to know extinction, and yet it seems to be extinction approaching limit Zero, some killing force acting on everything it can find, touch, destroy. Again, the centrifugal and centripetal forces at work in the narrative.
And Pynchon enacts this pandemonium, as the voice of the book flutters and wows in and out of Pirate Prentice, Slothrop, Blicero, Katje.
Think about this passage on page 5-6:
Bloat is one of the co-tenants of the place, a maisonette erected last century, not far from the Chelsea Embankment, by Corydon Thrisp, an acquaintance of the Rossettis' who wore hair smocks and liked to cultivate pharmaceutical plants up on the roof (a tradition young Osbie Feel has lately revived), a few of them hardy enough to survive fogs and frosts, but most returning, as fragments of peculiar alkaloids, to rooftop earth, along with manure from a trio of prize Wessex Saddleback sows quartered there by Throsp's successor, and dead leaves off many decorative trees transplanted to the roof by later tenants, and the odd unstomachable meal thrown or vomited there by this or that sensitive epicurean all got scumbled together, eventually, by the knives of the seasons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black topsoil in which anything could grow, not the least being bananas. Pirate, driven to despair by the wartime banana shortage, decided to build a glass hothouse on the roof, and persuade a friend who flew the Rio-to-Ascension-to-Fort-Lamy run to pinch him a sapling banana tree or two, in exchange for a German camera, should Pirate happen across one on his next mission by parachute.
This paragraph is the very scumble, the impasto that it contains the description of. And the narrative style of the book mirrors this. History is mixed in with psychonarration, only to slip out into a song, into an action sequence, into a sex scene. The only consistency is the psychosis, the interplay of pathology, and the larger meta-narrative of order and disorder at work on every level (a fractal enactment) of the text.
When I say fractal, I meant that this scramble also works in terms of narrative structure, the movement from viewpoint to viewpoint, story to story. It even works inside the paragraphs, the authorial voice mixed in with the character in the looseness of free indirect discourse (FID).
I think this is a very generative way to live with the book. What are the games that Pynchon is making with the scumble? What is he mixing? What is decaying, and what grows from the crazy compost to takes its place? Is History some larger block of free indirect discourse, mashed together bannana batter-like into some sort of order that makes sense to the chef, but very little to the pancake?
I've got to take a new picture of my book, because my tagging system is totally out of control. It's something that I developed when I started teaching at Iowa, using those little postit flags to mark my marginalia in the text. I would markup a book, and then arrive at the head of the classroom to find it almost impossible to relocate the passages i wanted to call attention to. The flags work miracles in this regard - so I'd like to make this shoutout to the good people of 3M for this awesome innovation.
I've been flagging a few things. The sad fact is that my system is evolving as I work my way into the text, so the color codes (almost wrote color coeds, which would be much more interesting. Grad school flashback?) are not totally consistent (what is with my parentheticals these days?).
RED - Started out as just a flag for swooping word acrobatics, but then I realized that I was mostly marking shit/decay/composting/palimpsest passages. So those are marking out that theme (almost wrote "making out" maybe "making out with colored coeds").
BLUE - Paranoia & "Deep Structure." The idea that there are agendas and forces at work larger than the supposed rationales for the war. The idea of the Firm, of opposites, of the space b/w One and Zero... the forces that are acting on the actors of the narrative. Beyond this, I'm looking for a basic schema that describes the centripetal and centrifugal forces acting on the narrative. Some of these forces, like death, are overdetermined, sometimes creating chaos and disorder, in other places enforcing an almost crystalline fascist hyperstructure.
GREEN - Capitalism. This is really a subset of the Blue schema hunt. But as readers of Against the Day will note, Pynchon has a particular axe to grind with the growth of transnational market forces as the primary organizing schema for the human enterprise in the 20th century. Its not a coincidence that he is beginning this interrogation at the parabolic height of the second world war, in particular fixating on the sort of systems logic creating a self-organizing ecosystem around the robot bomb of the V2.
ORANGE - Words I have never, never heard of. The winner this week? Ctenophile - a perverse lover of combs. Can't imagine why I hadn't run across that one before.
There is one more big idea I want to write about, something that I've been seeing with a formal clarity that I missed the first couple go-rounds i've had with GR. That idea is Free Indirect Discourse (or as our German brothers might say, "freie indirekte Gedankenwiedergabe." In fact, a more accurate description of this might be Floating Free Indirect Discourse.
Basically, yes, GR is narrated in the 3rd person voice. We have the solid anchor point of the authorial voice, that intellect that seems to be standing orthogonal to the history of the narrative "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now." The ordering mind of GR is speaking these words, the same intellect that placed that Von Braun epigraph, "Nature does not know extinction..."
But intermixed with the oblate god (small g intended) of the narrator there are so many other voices. This is hell and hell is other people. Nature does not seem to know extinction, and yet it seems to be extinction approaching limit Zero, some killing force acting on everything it can find, touch, destroy. Again, the centrifugal and centripetal forces at work in the narrative.
And Pynchon enacts this pandemonium, as the voice of the book flutters and wows in and out of Pirate Prentice, Slothrop, Blicero, Katje.
Think about this passage on page 5-6:
Bloat is one of the co-tenants of the place, a maisonette erected last century, not far from the Chelsea Embankment, by Corydon Thrisp, an acquaintance of the Rossettis' who wore hair smocks and liked to cultivate pharmaceutical plants up on the roof (a tradition young Osbie Feel has lately revived), a few of them hardy enough to survive fogs and frosts, but most returning, as fragments of peculiar alkaloids, to rooftop earth, along with manure from a trio of prize Wessex Saddleback sows quartered there by Throsp's successor, and dead leaves off many decorative trees transplanted to the roof by later tenants, and the odd unstomachable meal thrown or vomited there by this or that sensitive epicurean all got scumbled together, eventually, by the knives of the seasons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black topsoil in which anything could grow, not the least being bananas. Pirate, driven to despair by the wartime banana shortage, decided to build a glass hothouse on the roof, and persuade a friend who flew the Rio-to-Ascension-to-Fort-Lamy run to pinch him a sapling banana tree or two, in exchange for a German camera, should Pirate happen across one on his next mission by parachute.
This paragraph is the very scumble, the impasto that it contains the description of. And the narrative style of the book mirrors this. History is mixed in with psychonarration, only to slip out into a song, into an action sequence, into a sex scene. The only consistency is the psychosis, the interplay of pathology, and the larger meta-narrative of order and disorder at work on every level (a fractal enactment) of the text.
When I say fractal, I meant that this scramble also works in terms of narrative structure, the movement from viewpoint to viewpoint, story to story. It even works inside the paragraphs, the authorial voice mixed in with the character in the looseness of free indirect discourse (FID).
I think this is a very generative way to live with the book. What are the games that Pynchon is making with the scumble? What is he mixing? What is decaying, and what grows from the crazy compost to takes its place? Is History some larger block of free indirect discourse, mashed together bannana batter-like into some sort of order that makes sense to the chef, but very little to the pancake?