GRGR: dogs

[Doug Millison]

Terrance may have already sniffed out these references, but I'll risk
posting them anyway.

"Once we know that the sacred king was ritually lamed in a way that obliged
him to swagger or luch on high heels, we understand at last two or three
hitherto mysterious ancient icons. Tantalus, suspecnded over the water with
a fruit-branch above his head and the water always slipping away is
evidently being lamed in the Llew Llaw fashion:  originally his hair is
tied to the branch, one foot is on the bank, the other rests on something
in the waster -- perhaps a large boat-shaped basin -- that slips away.
Tantalus is a perfect type of Dionysus:  he was married to Euryanassa
(another form of Eurynome) a Moon-goddess; he was thrown down from Mount
Sipylus, in Pasgian Lydia, where was afterwards buried and had a hero
shrine; he was Pelops's cannibalistic father; he helped to steal a Dog from
a Cretan cave; and from his name derive three other Greek words meaning,
like saleuin, from which saleuma is formed, 'to swagger or lurch in one's
gait': tantaloein, tantaleuein and, by a metathesis, talantoein."
--Robert Graves, _The White Goddess_, p. 333 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1948)

"Mr. Pointsman drags his leg over to a shattered staircase, swings it
quiet, so as not to alarm the dog [...] then limping, clanking, he heads
back toward the car to get a hand from young Mexico [...]" -- GR, p. 42

"Aesculapius is represented in Greek art with a dog beside him and an staff
in his hand around which twine orcular snakes."  TWG, p. 52

Aesculapius had the power to raise the dead.  It's probably stretching, but
if we consider Dr. Pointsman a mad scientist in the Gothic mode of Dr.
Frankenstein (reanimator of the dead; TRP in his Luddite essay invites us,
it seems to me, to make such a comparison), Pointsman and his dogs might be
seen in an Aesculapian light.

"Hercules overcame the Dog Cerebrus by a narcotic cake which relaxed its
vigilance" --TWG, p. 53

"Here, fellow," coaxes Roger. "Nice bottle of *ether* here for you," -- GR
p. 44

"When the Name was revealed, Amathaon and Gwydion instituted a new relgious
system, and a new calendar, and new names of letters, and installed the
Dog, Roebuck and Lapwing as guardians not of the old Name, which he had
guessed, but of the new."--TWG, p. 286 [re:  secret Name of the
"transcendental god of the Hyperboreans"]

I offer these correspondences for fun, in no way pretending to be
uncovering anything definitive. I'm not schooled in the relationship that
might exist between _The White Goddess_ and GR, and I'm certainly not a
fluent interpreter of Graves' work; I have heard Graves' book called a
source for TRP's fiction. I'd be surprised if some Pynchon scholar has not
already traced out the relevant links between GR and TWG, and placed them
in their proper context -- if somebody knows of and cares to point me to
such a resource, thanks in advance. Maybe I'm just barking up the wrong
tree.

d o u g  m i l l i s o n  http://www.online-journalist.com