Pynchon, Shakespeare, Kyd

[Andrew Dinn]

James Cummings writes:

>      "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" seems like a good place to start looking
>      for Shakespearian influences. The title is from "Measure for Measure"
>      (Act I Scene I) where Duke Vincentio hands over the government of Vienna
>      to Angelo with the words 

>         Mortality and mercy in Vienna
>         Live in thy tongue and heart

>      Unfortunately I don't have my copy of the story with me, but as
>      I remember the protagonist has been put in charge of a party?
>      (and the people who play silent jazz are called something like
>      the Duc di Angelis Quartet).

Pynchon is slightly deprecatory about literary borrowings in his intro
to `Slow Learner'. OK, he is not actually against them per se but he
does point out how reference to the Waste Land and a play (Hamlet, I
think or maybe King Lear?) are irrelevant to the the story they appear
in (A Small Rain) and hence just so much pretentious name-dropping and
culture-checking.

Perhaps this criticism also applies to M&MinV which (I believe)
preceded the other stories, although I am inlcined to think that the
reference to `Measure For Measure' is quite significant, not just
because of the V in Vienna.

First, there is the interplay between the young, up and thrusting,
ambitious Angelo and the old manipulative figure of Vincentio. The
opposition of an A and a V is in itself interesting but consider:
Vincentio represents a dominant manipulative order which apparently
relinquishes its control but is actually working behind the scenes
unknown to the other players; whilst Angelo attempts to rise from his
lowly position by strict adherence to the forms of virtue yet cannot
control his own fall to lust (lust to fall), his own tendency to
disorder. This is Henry Adam's Virgin and Archangel Michael or
Pynchon's V and the A4.

Then there is Angelo's Gravity. Shortly after Vincentio grants Angelo
power over Vienna the latter states as an aside that he must adopt the
air of gravity appropriate to his new position. You know, gravity,
that `strange carriage of the body to disguise the infirmities of the
mind'. And Angelo's fall comes about because of an excess of such
gravity. He denies his own natural feelings/failings/fallings and
lands all the harder for trying to rise too high, all the more
uncontrolledly for striving too hard to control. Angelo's downfall
ends merely with loss of honour but life intact. Let's only hope we
also survive the fallout from Gravity's Angel if it ever completes
that last delta-t at the end of the rainbow.


Andrew Dinn
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there is no map / and a compass / wouldn't help at all