V-ness ('am I low?)

[jporter]

>One way to read V. (out of thousands) is as a sophisticated parody of
>historiocity, a dark play on our an attempt to find the hidden dynamic (eg,
>Henry Adams's the V-irgin and the Dynamo) of the 20th Century--the Century
>that seems so fundamentally different than all preceeding (at least to
>those living in it--though, no doubt, Herodotus, upon witnessing the
>terrors of the Persian Wars, must have thought the same thing about his
>century, 220 before ours).
>
>So the angles of approach to V., the disparate peepholes on the 20th
>Century, with its unique and attendent horrors, such as the concentration
>camp and the atomic weapon, the apparently acclerating slide toward global
>inanimacy, are myriad.
>
>Take entropy, itself a powerful enthymeme in V. (since it's presence is
>overarching but is never mentioned by Name).  Entropy is also an unspoken
>metaphor for a kind of historical determinism, a one-way flow of history,
>as iron-clad as anything penned by Oswald Spengler, and, therefore, I
>believe, something of a joke on Pynchon's part, though admittedly a dark
>one. An obsession with things entropic is a sign of a disturbed and
>disjointed mind, since entropy itself has little meaning in the context of
>the individual...It is a sign of spatial displacement, an exacerbated
>alienation.  Entropy as metaphore is a frame, a stencil, an elastic
>epistemology to be stretched out and applied to vast systems, historical,
>philosophical and/or physical. Inside this frame, the individual perceives
>itself as a victim of unalterable historical forces, in this case, forces
>of inevitable annhilation. (Kind of like the current state of feminist
>thinking, n'est pas?)
>
>But we must assume, or at least I do, that Pynchon is no determinist. In
>fact, Pynchon seems to be the utlimate in-determinist, which does not carry
>with the a-morality of "a relativist."  Indeterminism may well be the
>post-Modern dilemma.  It certainly is Herbert's and Benny's--though in
>uniquely different ways.  For me, one of the things V. is "about" is the
>failure of historical determinism to relate to everyday reality, the
>failure to make things "fit." That, in fact, these kinds of structural
>(Toynbee), deterministic (Spengler) and mechanistic (Marx) views of history
>end up working as Plots against the People (read Preterite etc.), as
>Frame-Ups. On the other hand, and here's the catch, such holistic narrative
>structures also may be quite necessary to navigate the icy, flesh-stripping
>shoals of post-Modern life.
>
>So Bonnie is quite right to focus on the role of myth in V., on the faces
>and fate of the fertility goddess, the mother of consciousness, the primal
>muse of poetry (according to Robt. Graves), the progeniture of a certain
>kind of history. For She was certainly an obsession of a string of
>historical determinists starting with Freud, through Jung, Frazier,
>Northrup Frye, to neo-Freudians like Lacan and neo-Jungians such as James
>Hillman.
>
>Here is James Frazier (1923, and another determinist--a despicable racist)
>on Aphrodite/Astarte:  It is possible that a native goddess of fertility
>was worshipped on the spot [ie, Aphrodite's Sanctuary at Paphos on Cyprus]
>before the arrival of the Phoenicians, and that the newcomers identified
>her with their own Baalath or Astarte, whom she may have resembled.  If two
>deities were thus fused into one, we may suppose that they were both
>varieties of that great goddess of motherhood and fertility whose worship
>appears to have been spread all over Western Asia from a very early time.
>The supposition is confirmed as well by the archaic shape of her image as
>by the licentious character of her rites; for both that shape and those
>rites were shared by her with other Asiatic dieties.  Her image was simply
>a white cone or pyramid.  In like manner, a cone was the emblem of Astarte
>at Byblus....Conical stones, which apparently served as idols, have also
>been found...in the Phoenician temples of Malta; and cones of sandstone
>came to light at the shrine of the "Mistress of Torquoise" among the barren
>hills and frowing precipices of Sinai.  In Cyprus and Malta it appears that
>before marriage all women were formerly obliged by custom to prostitute
>themselves to strangers at the sanctuary of the goddess, whether she went
>be the name of Aphrodite, Astarte or what not...the practice was clearly
>regarded, not as an orgy of lust, but as a solemn religious duty performed
>in the service of the great Mother Goddess...every woman, whether rich or
>poor, had once in her life to submit to the embraces of a stranger...and to
>dedicate to the goddess the wages earned by this sacrificed harlotry."
>
>Which does, I would say, put the period on the "V"--if you know what I mean.
>
>So with the onslaught of the 20th Century we encounter the Death of Myth,
>its deconstruction, its comparative analysis, and cold interpretation. As
>part-by-part the old ways, the archetypes of culture imbricated into
>consciousness and language, are replaced by inanimate technologies,
>artificial devices of power and remote sensation--the progress of V.
>her/itself.
>
>So what is V.?  Perhaps, V is an inverted A, "A" for Astarte and Aphrodite,
>Artemis. The symbol for these Goddesses was a white cone or a pyramid.
>Again an inverted V.
>
>But where there are two there should be three--the third part being the
>relationship, the bond, the interface, between the two.  V is a triangle
>with the third part, the relationship, missing, obscured, removed,
>murdered.
>
>This were Freud comes in. Freud as updated by Lacan.  This is the landscape
>of paranoiac knowledge, where the culture itself has descended (or
>ascended, depending on your perspective) into a state of historical
>schizophrenia, filled with strange twins, where images are manufactured
>through a process of doubling, of splitting, all that.  The links between
>language and reality have broken apart, have been elided, or turned
>upside-down, replaced by artifacts, duplications or re-creations. Our
>relationship to the "world" has been altered in a fundamental and
>irredemable way. Thus, we are driven, like Stencil, by a need to restore
>what is missing, realign the relationship between signs and signed, delve,
>like Orpheus and his lyre or Aneas carrying his Broken Bough, into the
>historical unconscious, the underworld, where everything of importance
>appears in a kind of impenetrable code, with hidden messages inscriped in
>the dark underflow of history, seeking the real name for that familiar but
>distorted face haunting us like drowned Ophelia from the black waters of
>our dreams.
>
>And here in the Underworld we encounter "V.," again.  And again she is
>split.  For in the hazy origins of myth, the Underworld (the dreamworld,
>the land of the death, the unchanging) and the Underground (the earth, the
>kinetic life force, the fertile soil) were linked in one Goddess,
>combining, as Bonnie has suggested, both the immutable and the temporal,
>death and life, fertility and decay. Now they have been spilt, they have
>been placed in deadly opposition--by what force? to who's benefit?
>
>What we have then in V. the character is an accretion of myths, a dense
>layering of divergent images and symbols, where Goddesses and Gods really
>do become multiple personalities, formed and re-formed as the dominant,
>imperialistic culture expanded, as It consumed the Other's myths and
>languages,in-corporated and recycled them for It's own purposes of
>domination and suppression.
>
>And still other myths, the subversive ones, of course, were horribly
>mutated, were inverted to work against us, or were killed off entirely.  It
>is a kind of mythological genocide.  In our historical warcrimes trial, our
>mytho-Nuremberg, we could start right off by indicting, trying, and frying
>characters such Jerome and Augustine.
>
>You bring the matches, I'll bring the marshmellows. It'll be the beginning
>of the Return of the Repressed!
>
>Staid as always,
>
>
>Steelhead

Get down, Steeley.....and take it home!

jp