Lenses in M&D--was ToV (spoilers out the b-tt)
dennis grace
amazing at mail.utexas.edu
Tue May 20 12:00:53 CDT 1997
Spoiler, but I don't remember which page--I haven't even reached it yet.
Ray responded to the ToV questions with
>i think it's a matter of gathering steam for what i take to be a major
>theme in m&d: as it is above, so it is below (see my posts about pk
>dick's trilogy v m&d (esp learned english dog scene). it's important for
>pynchon, imho, to establish a connection between stargazing (mason's
>forte) and land surveying (dixon's), both thematically and as a space in
>which to develop the characters of m&d thru the lens of history. (i
>guess i only sort of meant to be punny there, since i just noticed it in
>rereading this).
Lenses, yeah . . . reminds me, someone mentioned a scene involving a thunder
storm in which the lightning illuminates their tent like a prism. I also
seem to recall mention somewhere about a mirror or mirrors (or maybe this is
yet further rpoof of mysleep-deprived brain's capacity for the manufacture
of hallucinatory hormones). Samuel R. (Chip) Delany, says a dusty brain
file dated Nineteen Seventy-Something, makes quite the fooforaw about
lenses, prisms, and mirrors in _Dhalgren_, some of the Bellona punks and
punkettes where chains of the optical creatures that generate giant
holograms around the wearers or something like that. Chip's point, however,
seemed to be that, in a world full of prisms, mirrors, and lenses, even
*seeing* ain't necessarily believin', ya know?
So now TRP gives us two scientific denizens of the Enlightenment who spent
the majority of their professional lives with one eye fixed to a lens--a
thingy that gives a distorted (i.e.--false) view of what lies before their
very reasonble eyes.
Of course, M&D have been tasked with doing what only *looks* possible
through a lens, transcribing a perfectly straight line onto an irregular
spheroid--something they've already "seen" (in parallax alone, n'est-ce pas)
accomplished by the ToV.
By G-d! I have no Idea how the forgoing managed to circuit itself back to
the original Topick.
Later,
dgg
Dennis Grace
University of Texas at Austin
English Department
Assistant Instructor
Recovering Medievalist
"But to return to madness." --Jonathan Swift's Grub-Street Hack, _A Tale of
a Tub_
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