About the site

Curriculum vitae

The Book

Books archive

First Drafts

Lola's diary

Free-writing

Links

contact Jeremy
contact Ellen

There are points in the book where the narration shifts abruptly from the third to the second person -- this happens again, poignantly, at the bottom of p. 389, where Pynchon, having told of a battle between the U-boat (does he ever name it?) and the U.S.S. John E. Badass -- a battle narrowly averted by the time-warping intervention of Oneirine -- goes on to address the U-boat's Argentine crew directly, and disconcertingly:

Now what sea is this you have crossed, exactly, and what sea is it you have plunged more than once to the bottom of, alerted, full of adrenaline, but caught really, buffaloed under the epistemologies of these threats that paranoid you so down and out, caught in this steel pot, softening to devitaminized mush inside the soup-stock of your own words, your waste submarine breath? It took the Dreyfus Affair to get the Zionists out and doing, finally: what will drive you out of your soup-kettle? Has it already happened? Was it tonight's attack and deliverance? Will you go to the Heath, and begin your settlement, and wait there for your Director to come?

Call me whacky but I get the feeling he's speaking to me here. Like on one level, as a reader -- reading GR feels like sailing (or swimming) across an ocean. And on another level, perhaps, as a member of the Congregation -- P is preaching to me, using the sea as a metaphor for my life thus far. I don't want to dissect that metaphor -- started to do that mentally just now. But I am quite interested in hearing from you all, whether you feel you are being addressed here, and in what connection.

Two notes: The Dreyfus Affair -- that is a case in which Alfred Dreyfus, an Jewish officer in the French army, was falsely accused of espionage at the turn of the last century; he was later exonerated. You can read about it on the web at http://www.albion.edu/student/jwank/eng1.htm. And "your Director" -- that is most obviously a reference to von Göll. What other meanings could it have?