MDMD(4) p.123 small re-write

andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk
Tue Jul 29 10:20:00 CDT 1997


David Casseres writes:
> There's a wonderful passage in Gravity's Rainbow about Kekule's famous 
> dream of the serpent with its tail in its mouth, which supposedly 
> revealed to him the structure of the aromatic hydrocarbons.  Pynchon's 
> point here is not to tell us anything about chemistry -- it's to deliver 
> a sermon on the abandonment of a tradition of spiritual revelation 
> through the poetic imagery of dreams, in favor of the industrial habit of 
> seeing any revelation as a clue to physical structure that can be 
> exploited for power and wealth; the IG chemists eventually reduce the 
> serpent image into little shiny hexagons that they wear as jewelry to 
> signify their connection to the ongoing triumph of chemical synthesis.  
> It's one of the places where I seem to hear Pynchon stepping forward to 
> speak his own opinions directly to the audience, in his own voice.

Not to disagree with David, but to add an overtone. The Nazis also
wear those little shiny hexagons because they cannot wholly abandon
the spiritualism that regarded poetry and dreams as manifest
revelation. They go through the motions of the old rituals (the older,
the better) with a mixture of longing and dissatisfaction unable to
invest them with the old meanings but also unable to abandon their
need for ritual. Here perhaps is a tie to Pynchon's critique of C18th
rationalism and science.


Andrew Dinn
-----------
We drank the blood of our enemies.
The blood of our friends, we cherished.



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