Discussion - Week Two - The Rifles - pg. 99 - 212

[Jim]

This discussion covers Page 99 - 212


Time travel?!


To avoid spoilers, please limit comments to page 1 – 212.

[Zadignose]

I believe in this case, canning was a very new development. Goldner won the British navy contracts by low bidding. I just searched out an article relating to this history here:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-2168...

(Haven't read all of it, but skipped forward to the part about the Goldner fiasco).

[Griffin]

The geographic minutiae of the whole thing was also very time consuming for me—I found myself referencing and cross-referencing the various hand-drawn maps.

[Zadignose]

The intermingling of timeframes, and the "real" with the "unreal" (though there's no actual distinction) can certainly add to the confusion.

[Jim]

I finally made it through this section of the book. Definitely more coherent than some of the Seven Dreams books.

[Zadignose]

Did you enjoy the Sedna and the Fulmar story? It was an interesting bit of folklore, at the same time it was mixed up with the author's own weird ideas and reflections on current cultural decadence, etc. It reminded me a bit of the tangled up fantasy/reality business that happened in some of the more bizarre sections of Europe Central.

[Jim]

Zadignose wrote: "Did you enjoy the Sedna and the Fulmar story? It was an interesting bit of folklore, at the same time it was mixed up with the author's own weird ideas and reflections on current cultural decadence..."

I did, especially the cut fingers being the source of animals and so on. Legends sourced from dreams, re-dreamt from legends - kind if how the whole series seems to work.

Yes, I can see the connection to E.C., and also to some parts of Gravity's Rainbow.

[Catherine]

There was a lot of jumping around in this section. It was hard to get used to for me. At one point it seemed like the whole reason Franklin wanted to go on another expedition was so that he could be with Reepah, even though Reepah doesn't exist yet...time is all jumbled up in this book.

I know that Franklin and Captain Subzero are supposed to be the same person, but I thought it was a sort of reincarnation. Now it looks like their lives are running parallel to each other, somehow. It's difficult to wrap my head around.

[Jim]

Catherine wrote: "There was a lot of jumping around in this section. It was hard to get used to for me. At one point it seemed like the whole reason Franklin wanted to go on another expedition was so that he could b..."

I don't remember exactly what page, but somewhere in there, time travel is mentioned. So basically, Subzero in the present is supposed to be Franklin from the past traveling into the future - or something like that.... I suppose all is possible in dreams.

[Zadignose]

I think another thing that makes the work bizarre is that, although Subzero and Franklin are meant to be one person, in some sense, it is also very hard to imagine them that way because they are fundamentally so different in character... except in the moments when their sense of identity sort of slips. Subzero also tends to be more easily identified with the author, especially as we can imagine Vollmann going off to the arctic on research missions for the writing of this book.

[Griffin]

The linkage seems to be the colonialistic impulse (in order of Franklin, Subzero, Vollmann/the reader who is culpable in Vollmann's project) to explore, find "exotic" love, and to understand colonization by reinscribing its processes while still being part of that selfsame colonial gaze. Vollmann is smart enough to acknowledge that the subaltern is still not speaking in his work in which there are Inuit characters—they are still interpreted and transmitted through his lens. This desire to "understand" the legacy of colonization from the outside, even in a critical manner, is still tied up in the initial exploratory ideology/impetus of Franklin's expeditions—we've come full circle.