Pynchon, Rilke & Things Angelic [was Re: MDMD(4) - Giant rob

[calbert at pop.tiac.net]

I recognize that I am in violation of the clip&snip rules recently 
affirmed, but I will need these comments as backdrop, though the 
learned utterances of Vaska and John deserve better.

This thread seems to founder on the idea that the "robed beings" 
serve a greater purpose in this passage than is readily apparent. 
With all due respect to the correspondents, there seems to be a lot 
of trimming of a square peg in order to pass it through the round 
hole. I think Pynchon is using these metaphors solely in the context 
of establishing the visual "tone" of St. Helena. Here is not only 
isolation, but almost an ontological insignificance represented by 
these barren rocks. I think that hinting at some purpose, and trying 
to glean it stands in direct contradiction to the notions of "forever 
unexplained, moving blind and remorseless", ideas which not only defy 
visible design, but explicitly contradict such. It dovetails 
elegantly with some of the larger themes of "the hubris of 
science"/"arrogance of man" vs. the permanence and indifference of 
cosmological progress.
This explanation lacks the elegance of a link to Rilke, and 
offers little in the way of greater associations with other p works. 
But there are times when I think P.  likes working on the 
poetry/prose edge, and does so for its own sake, rather than as a 
means to promote some greater creation myth or the like.
Now pg. 112 offers the following:
"-for consider that the murderer cannot, in the Moment, know the 
ecstatic surprise of the Innocent, having borne within him, from 
Life's beginning, an acquaintance with the sudden Drop and Snap of its 
End. He dreams about it, sometimes when awake. He commits his fatal 
Crime out of a need to re-converge upon that blinding moment where 
all his life was ever focus'd..."
Not only is this "pure" Pynchon but there is a similar thread in a 
recent short story by Cynthia Ozick which appeared in the Atlantic 
Monthly, will someone more familiar with her Puttermeister(sp?) tales 
please chime in?
cfa
trying

> John Atchison suggests:
> >Could they not be the same beings.... called to bear witness, not to
> >intervene. Sent to observe and to report [SNIP]  
> Vaska:
> >> these sinister
> >> "Giant rob'd Beings" do remind me of the Rilkean angels in _GR_: Rilke's
> >> angels were also pitiless and destructive.  
> 
> I believe they are -- although I'm not sure how "blind and remorseless"
> beings can truly bear witness to anything.  They seem to me more like some
> apocalyptic "riders of the storm," though I still have no idea how to read
> that _M&D_ passage, and what these allusions may really be doing right there
> where they appear in the novel. 
> 
> I just took another look at what Rilke does in the _Duino Elegies_, and
> here's what I've found: at the very beginning of the first one, he fuses
> beauty with terror, and both with those angelic orders of whom "Each single
> angel is terrible" yet "serenely disdains to destroy us."  Right at the end
> of the _Elegies_, however, in the City of Pain section, in a highly charged
> apocalyptic moment, Rilke writes:  
> 
>         How an Angel would tread beyond trace their market of comfort
>         with the church alongside, bought ready for use....
> 
> I suspect that in Pynchon's eyes, this particular Rilkean Angel may be a
> "blind and remorseless" being indeed: in _GR_, where Pynchon pays his homage
> to Rilke in an aside about his "mean poem about der Leid-Stadt," Pynchon
> then also goes on to write [close to the end of the novel] a little prose
> elegy of his own, a lament for all the cities of the world, and a plea that
> each City of Pain, however debased and routinized the life of its people may
> have become, be saved. 
> 
> >From bombs as well as Angels, I take it.  But why Pynchon has woven all of
> this into the St. Helena section and that particular passage of _M&D_, I
> can't tell. Yet.  
> 
> Vaska, who keeps on hoping
> 
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