grgr (34): "the tower" (747)

[jbor]

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>From: "J Suete"

snip
> What about Weisenburger's comments on Weissmann's Tarot?  What about his
> comments on the Tower? He says, "Both Waite and Ouspensky speak of the card
> as a symbol of ruin coming to an entire body of doctrine, perhaps here the
> body of Weissmann's decadent romanticism."

I think Otto's interpretation of The Tower, which both covers Weissmann's
significator (i.e. the character himself at this moment in the narrative)
and recurs allusively in that final heretical hymn, is closer to the mark.

The image invokes the idea of unexpected destruction from the sky, in a
word, Catastrophe.

It "covers" Weissmann, meaning "his present condition is set forth by it",
and then the narrative goes on to offer several different interpretations of
the card -- perhaps even a couple from that *Idiot's Guide to the Tarot*
"Jane" mentions. In this position I take it as referring to the Third Reich
itself, which aspired to be just such a cataclysmic force within human
history, but as Pynchon has shown us throughout this text (and emphasised in
some of his non-fiction works as well) Nazism was but a single episode, one
example, amongst an array of similar small-h holocausts since the dawn of
Human Civilisation, all of them founded on similarly utopianist ideals. In a
reading it's the sort of Major Arcana card which relies on the following
cards to manifest its significance.

Its recurrence in the final hymn would be anachoric -- I doubt that William
Slothrop dabbled in the esoteric arts -- though perhaps not quite
anachronistic, as the Tarot as we know it today derives from the late Middle
Ages at least, and may have had roots in ancient Egyptian initiation
rituals, traditional Indian culture, or the occult lore of the nomadic
Romanies (gypsies). The other capitalised proper nouns in the final poem are
not Tarot cards, so the connection is contentious, but it is not without
foundation I think. Here in the hymn I see the Light as a reference to that
vain (both vainglorious and in vain) human faith in a God-being and Divine
Purpose -- Christian, Gnostic or otherwise -- Which or Whom will presumably
overthrow the powerful, "evil", Elect, and redeem and/or resurrect etc etc
"the meek"/Pret'rite feebs (which we all in fact really are) at the last
moment (He/It is elsewhere revealed as the superhero who arrives "Too late"
in the 'Chase Music' fragment 751-2). It is myth, a mortal comfort. The hymn
exemplifies exactly the sort of "herd-mentality" that Nietzsche was on
about:

     God is dead: but considering the state the species Man is in,
    there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will
    be shown. (*The Gay Science*, bk 3 sect. 116)

The thing is, the horrible irony of it all, what is there poised just
*outside* the cave, *our* cave (i.e. the Orpheus Theatre) at this very
moment, what Pynchon tries to draw our attention to again and again in this
text, is the total obliteration of life -- not just that selfish and
self-involved species Man, it is the extinction and end of the "green
uprising" itself, *all* Life -- which *our* science, with the splitting of
the atom and whatnot, *is* now able to bring about.

The certainty of William Slothrop's hymn is of a different timbre, it is
expressed in an enormously different modality, to those contingent hopes
which elsewhere peer through Pynchon's text.

best