X-Resent-Date:  Thu, 20 Aug 92 10:34:56 CDT
X-Resent-From:  WESCHAP@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu
X-Resent-To:    weschap@uiucvmd
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Date:         Thu, 20 Aug 1992 10:39:56 CDT
Comments:     Resent-From: WESCHAP@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu
Comments:     Originally-From: Wes Chapman <weschap@uiucvmd>
From:         WESCHAP@VMD.CSO.UIUC.EDU
Subject:      Gravity's Rainbow

Chris, I can't give you exact page references to that edition, but the
scene in question occurs right before Blicero's long monologue to
Gottfried about the Deathkingdom (toward the end of the book).
Actually, there are similar passages scattered throughout GR, but that's
the only one I could remember without the book in front of me.  Now,
about your comment:
"That is, this phenomenon seems
inherently textual, not real, something that HAS to be in a book.  If it
isn't mimetic, then, its point must be aesthetic rather than
epistemological,
don't you think?  Perhaps we might argue that discourses produce visions
in
different people, that those visions are written into us from outside,
as,
say, Gerty MacDowell's romantic fantasies all seem controlled by her
society's
cultural product (I'm referring to the "Nausicaa" chapter in _Ulysses_).
Nevertheless, there always seems to me that no matter how much we
question
and obliterate the self, there is still some tiny subjectivity doing the
questioning.  I'm not sure if there's much we could do with that self,
but
it still seems to be there.  If that self is not autonymous, what is the
self making that distinction?"
There's a lot here, so let me take it in parts.  Yes, the phenomenon is
inherently textual, something that has to happen in a book.
But I don't see why that should limit the function, meaning, or purpose
of the technique to the sphere of the aesthetic rather than the
epistemological; presumably any literary technique has both aesthetic
*and* epistemological ramifications; it's just a matter of which
critical lens you're looking through. In this case, the epistemological
implications of the passage are in my opinion very much as you describe
them: the point is that selves are constituted by discourses, and
therefore no one is pure, somehow apart from the destructiveness of the
dominant discourses (Geli's vision, which we might expect to be caring
and progressive and relatively uncontaminated by Blicero's "structures
favoring death" simply because Geli is the kind of person she is, fades
uncomfortably into Gottfried's musings, thoroughly caught up in
Blicero's).  This is more of a political claim than an epistemological
one, perhaps, but it has definite epistemological consequences--if you
can't represent something except through discourse, then you can only
know it through discourse.  The object itself is bracketed, as in _The
Waves_.

As for your questions about the self--they're good questions, but I
think they are unnecessarily polarized; you seem to imply that a self
which is not autonymous has no freedom at all, and a self which is
constructed by discourses has no individuality at all.  Some pomo
theorists seem to make that claim, but I would argue that it implies a
very simplistic notion of "discourse."  Discourses are always *plural*,
that's the main thing.  Even in the most hegemonic, controlled media
(I'm thinking of TV, but fill in the blank), there are always many
different discourses warring with each other:  soap operas offer quite a
different ethos than do Westerns, and although in some ways they may
support each other (the strong silent loner of the Western has some
similarities with the strong silent lover of the soap opera), in other
ways they contradict.  Furthermore, many discourses are localized and
idiosyncratic:  neighborhood slang, family jokes, etc., those are
*discourses*, and they shape the self quite as much as the "larger
discourses" (more, for that matter). Without even factoring in
experiences which are not textual or are incompletely textual (the smell
of honeysuckle is partly represented by language and its meaning is
certainly overdetermined by "texts" in the widest possible sense, but
the experience of that smell is not strictly reducible to those texts),
the multiplicity of discourses which constitute any one individual is in
itself sufficient to account for considerable (albeit tricky,
compromised, never complete) individuality and even freedom.
yrs,
sorry for quoting glitches and length
Wes Chapman
Illinois Wesleyan University
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