From pp 397-433:
Franz Pokler, a German rocket scientist. He is marginally associated with early attempts to develop rockets in the 1920's. During the war, Weissmann controls Pokler, giving him routine assignments and keeping him in line by allowing him yearly visits from a girl who he says is Pokler's daughter. The girl spends the rest of the year in a concentration camp, and Weissmann's implied threat is that she will be killed if Pokler fails to cooperate with Weissmann's scheme. Weissmann's purpose is to use Pokler to make one small part for the A4 rocket. In the end, having performed his task, Pokler is released; Slothrop meets him living quietly in the ruins of a children's village after the end of the war. His daughter also survives.
Wiki notes on the Franz Pokler section 397-433
Abstract of "Franz Pökler's Anti-Story: Narrative and Self in Gravity's Rainbow" by Robert L. McLaughlin. (access the article here from Pynchon Notes)
Gravity's Rainbow complicates traditional notions of narrative and self in two interconnecting ways. The text is both a narrative that problematizes the individuated self and a metafiction that problematizes the forms traditionally seen as making narrative a vehicle for communicating meaning.
"...the text challenges the idea of a coherent, self-responsible individual interacting uniquely with the world."
McLaughlin's most cited work is "Post-Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the Social World" in symploke.
In rhetoric, symploce refers to the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning and the end of successive clauses or sentences. It combines anaphora (repetition at the beginning) and epistrophe (repetition at the end), also known as complexio. The effect is a powerful emphasis and rhythm that highlights the connection between the repeated phrases and the contrast between the different options or possibilities being discussed. (Wikipedia).
Franz Pokler post on Reddit: "...I don't think I gave it quite the attention it deserves."
Reading Wikipedia on GR: Poet L. E. Sissman, in his Gravity's Rainbow review for The New Yorker, said of Pynchon: "He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks. Thus his remarkably supple diction can first treat a painful and delicate love scene and then roar, without pause, into the sounds and echoes of a drudged and drunken orgy."
P. 403 Ovatjimba
"Ovatjimba are an indigenous, hunter-gatherer group in Namibia, particularly in the Kaokoveld region, who speak Herero. They are considered a marginalized community and face economic hardship. Ovatjimba, along with the San and Ovatue, are recognized as indigenous peoples in Namibia. Location: Primarily reside in the Kunene Region, in the semi-arid and mountainous north-west of Namibia, according to the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA). Lifestyle: Historically, they were hunter-gatherers, and although some have diversified their livelihoods, many still rely on livestock and crop farming. Marginalization: Ovatjimba are one of the most marginalized groups in Namibia, facing significant economic hardship and poverty, as detailed in a report by New Era Namibia." Google
P404: “ In his electro-mysticism, the triode was as basic as the cross in Christianity. Think of the ego, the self that suffers a personal history bound to time, as the grid. The deeper and true Self is the Row between cathode and plate. The constant, pure flow. Signals - sense-data, feelings, memories relocating are put onto the grid, and modulate the flow. We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero.”
P. 420 Sastrugi: are features formed by the erosion of snow by wind.
Zak Smith's conception of Ilsa?
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