Episode 8 (79-88) (47-53)

Dienstag, 19. Dezember 1944, nach 2 Uhr. Dr. Pointsman und sein Kollege Kevin Spectro diskutieren den Fall Tyrone Slothrop Im St. Veronica’s Hospital: Ideas of the Opposite


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Ideas of the Opposite

Die Umkehr der normalen Ordnung der Dinge, die Umkehrung der binären Oppositionen, der Abfolge von Ursache und Wirkung, ist das zentrale Thema und vorherrschende Stilmittel des Romans, wie etwa im Gespräch zwischen Pointsman und Spectro:
“Imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! a piece of time neatly snipped out a few feet of film run backwards the blast of the rocket, fallen faster than sound—then growing out of it the roar of its own fall, catching up to what’s already death and burning a ghost in the sky.
Pavlov was fascinated with “ideas of the opposite.” Call it a cluster of cells, somewhere on the cortex of the brain. Helping to distinguish pleasure from pain, light from dark, dominance from submission (…) He’s out there, and he can feel them coming, days in advance. But it’s a reflex. A reflex to something that’s in the air right now. Something we’re too coarsely put together to sense—but Slothrop can.
“But that makes it extrasensory.”
“Why not say ‘a sensory cue we just aren’t paying attention to.’ (…) “So, Slothrop. Conceivably. Out in the city, the ambience alone—suppose we considered the war itself as a laboratory? when the V-2 hits, you see, first the blast, then the sound of it’s falling the normal order of stimuli reversed that way so he might turn a particular corner, enter a certain street, and for no clear reason feel suddenly ” (…) (49)
“(…) this transmarginal leap, this surrender. Where ideas of the opposite have come together, and lost their oppositeness.” (50)
Was für Spectro wie aussersinnliche Wahrnehmung aussieht, ist für Pointsman lediglich ein konditionierter Reflex auf etwas, was bereits da ist.

Episode 7 Episode 9

I Beyond the Zero II Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering III In the Zone IV The Counterforce

Index Hauptseite Vorwort Die Parabel Dekonstruktion Michael D. Bell Summary Biographie Richard Fariña Robert Frost Galerie Literatur Luddism Monographien u. Aufsätze Patterns–Muster Proverbs for Paranoids Schweine Soccer Weblinks The Wizard of Oz Fay Wray The Zero Homepage Page up/Seitenanfang

Professor Irwin Corey Accepts the National Book Award for Thomas Pynchon
Charles Hollander: Pynchon’s Inferno
Douglas Kløvedal Lannark: Paperware to Vaporware, The Nativity of Tyrone Slothrop
Douglas Kløvedal Lannark: Mason & Dixon: Astrological Review

© Otto Sell – Sunday, July 02, 2000
Last update Monday, February 13, 2006

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