I'm often fascinated when people talk about a particular structure or intent to someone's style, e.g. Debord claiming to have left gaps in his writing and hidden certain things; Derrida allegedly writing the way he did as a demonstration of his theory.
That sort of claim tends to add a layer of mystery for me as I'm not always able to pick up on the structure myself, so the idea there's some occulted component can be tantalising. It's great marketing, if nothing else.
Something which stuck from reading Kenner was his pointing out how much of the language we use to describe writing is spatial. We talk about things like depth and surface, levels and structure. One of the more interesting aspects of
Cylconopedia's what Negarestani terms 'Hidden Writing' and how plot holes and inconsistencies can be entrances to a tunnel network of traps, tombs and treasures beneath a text.
This sort of thing's why the scene in
Gravity's Rainbow with the ruined factory seems to be the defining image of the book for me. It's been prodding me like a splinter since I read it:
There doesn’t exactly dawn, no but there breaks, as that light you’re afraid will break some night at too deep an hour to explain away—there floods on Enzian what seems to him an extraordinary understanding. This serpentine slagheap he is just about to ride into now, this ex-refinery, Jamf Ölfabriken Werke AG, is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order. Only waiting for the right connections to be set up, to be switched on... modified, precisely, deliberately by bombing that was never hostile, but part of a plan both sides—”sides?” —had always agreed on... yes and now what if we—all right, say we are supposed to be the Kabbalists out here, say that’s our real Destiny, to be the scholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it’s all squeezed limp of its last drop... well we assumed—natürlich!—that this holy Text had to be the Rocket, orururumo orunene the high, rising, dead, the blazing, the great one (“orunene” is already being modified by the Zone-Herero children to “omunene,” the eldest brother)... our Torah. What else? Its symmetries, its latencies, the cuteness of it enchanted and seduced us while the real Text persisted, somewhere else, in its darkness, our darkness... even this far from Südwest we are not to be spared the ancient tragedy of lost messages, a curse that will never leave us... . But, if I’m riding through it, the Real Text, right now, if this is it... or if I passed it today somewhere in the devastation of Hamburg, breathing the ashdust, missing it completely... if what the IG built on this site were not at all the final shape of it, but only an arrangement of fetishes, come-ons to call down special tools in the form of 8th AF bombers yes the “Allied” planes all would have been, ultimately, IG-built, by way of Director Krupp, through his English interlocks—the bombing was the exact industrial process of conversion, each release of energy placed exactly in space and time, each shock-wave plotted in advance to bring precisely tonight’s wreck into being thus decoding the Text, thus coding, recoding, redecoding the holy Text... If it is in working order, what is it meant to do?
