Pynchon reference in Varo book

[Matthew P Wiener]

Regarding a book on missile testing, Evan Corcoran writes:

>A brief mention of Pynchon appears in the book "Chasing Gravity's Rainbow."
>A single paragraph mentions his invention of the term "gravity's rainbow" to
>describe the arc of a ballistic missile in flight.  There is nothing else of
>interest to the Pynchon student in the remainder of the book.

I would think ballistic missiles _are_ of interest to the Pynchon student!
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Of required interest to the Pynchon student is the paragraph in Janet
Kaplan UNEXPECTED JOURNEYS: THE ART AND LIFE OF REMEDIOS VARO.  It's
on page 230 (for the paranoid, the index says 250), describing Varo's
influence:

	Thomas Pynchon included a description of Varo's *Embroider-
	ing Earth's Mantle* [in] THE CRYING OF LOT 49, using it as a
	central metaphor for the psychological state of his heroine,
	who is moved to tears on confronting those "frail girls
	prisoner in their tower" who embroider their voluminous
	tapestry "seeking hopelessly to vill the void."*  Pynchon is
	known to have visited Mexico in the year of [her first]
	retrospective [1964], and Varo's work has been credited
	as the predominating iconographic source for his novel:
	"To read THE CRYING OF LOT 49 with a book of Varo's repro-
	ductions at hand is often to be struck by parallels in
	imagery and similarities of atmosphere, as if Pynchon had
	gone to school for his images."**

*: TCOL49, (Bantam) pp 9-10. [ie, the end of chapter 1]
**: David Cowart, THOMAS PYNCHON: THE ART OF ALLUSION, p25.

The painting in question has six women, wearing a nun's habit up to
the neck, but with their hair showing, engaged in needlework, with
their handiwork feeding out through six slits, like old fashioned
line printers.  The work accumulates below, and is seen to be the
very ground, complete with trees, buildings, people, seas, etc.  Two
masked figures are also in the tower, one stirring some alchemical
concoction from which the threads the women are working one manate,
and the other in the back playing a flute.

Only two of the women's faces are visible.  One seems pensive, the
other happy.  I would not call them prisoners, or frail, and they
don't seem to be seeking anything.  On the other hand, Varo herself
apparently thought of them that way: EEM is the second of three
"autobiographical" paintings about her Catholic background.  The
pensive woman has also magically found a way to leave: on the way
down is a barely noticeable 2-D image of her with a lover meeting
in the woods.

As for Varo's work overall, she has long been one of my favorite
painters.  She was the only surrealist who had a sense for science,
technology, and engineering.  In this sense, I can see parallels
between Pynchon and Varo.  But otherwise, no.  Varo's is always a
quiet surrealism, nothing grotesque, nothing forceful, a kind of
background music that you have to always listen for.
--
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba at sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)