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/lit/ - Literature

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12671482 No.12671482 [Reply] [Original]

>From Gravity's Rainbow:

“The rain lets up at midnight. He leaves Margherita to creep out in the cold city with his five kilos, having kept for himself the one Tchitcherine plundered from. Russian troops are singing in their billets. The salt ache of accordion music cries on in back of them. Drunks materialize, merry and pissing in the center grooves of cobbled alleys. Mud occupies some streets like flesh. Shell craters brim with rainwater, gleaming in the lights of midwatch work crews clearing debris. Shattered Biedermeier chair, mateless boot, steel eyeglass frame, dog collar (eyes at the edges of the twisting trail watching for sign, for blazing)”

What does Pynchon mean by sign and blazing? Is this some Pavlov joke that flew over my head? Or is it just literal, as in signs of others, blazing lights?

>> No.12671659

bump

>> No.12671775
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12671775

He cute

>> No.12671792

>>12671482
Burning bush. Looking for a sign. 2+2 =4.

>> No.12671804

>>12671792
I think you're wrong about that, but okay. That's a fine interpretation.
I think it has something to do with Pavlov.
I remember something about Pavlov's theory having something to do with "blazing" certain parts of the brain using "signs".
There's a sort of progressive metaphorical connection to the story found in these signs as well:
Shattered Biedermeier chair, mateless boot, steel eyeglass frame, dog collar

>> No.12671826

>>12671792
are you basing that off the fact that he's carrying 5 kilos?
Because hashish is what he has, and that's hardly a plant.
But I did notice the previous paragraph which might lend some credence to your interpretation:

“Rain drips, soaking into the floor, and Slothrop perceives that he is losing his mind. If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long. Well right now Slothrop feels himself sliding onto the antiparanoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and only pasteboard images now of the Listening Enemy left between him and the wet sky.”

But at the same time, that could be part of the joke, that he's bordering on religious paranoia.
Not sure, could just as easily also be the pavlov thing.

>> No.12671828

>>12671775
Lel