The tower (747)

[David Simpson]

Pynchon writes with an acute awareness of previous literature and especially of
distinguished prior uses of a word or symbol very much in mind. Hence his
"tower" is almost certain to recollect a wide range of  earlier literary
"towers," from the Bible and Milton to Browning and Yeats. He probably has in
mind something like Tower = Babel = the Rocket = Technology = Western
Civilization. Other possible associations include churches and castles (hence
the Church and the Ruling classes), observatories and watchtowers (= Vision =
Imagination and Poetry (as in Yeats) = Metaphysics or Apocalypse) and towers as
places of seclusion and captivity (cf. Lot 49).



--
"Anything can be said about world history, including anything that might occur
to the most distraught imagination. There is only one thing that cannot be said
about it--that it is sensible." -- FD, Notes from Underground.