V.V. 3--Time, place, and mirror-time

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Don Corathers schrieb:

> Time and place
>
> The events of Chapter Two happen in the course of one day (and into the next early morning) in February, 1956. Because Pynchon's treatment of time is effortlessly fluid, and because in this chapter some pains have been taken to call the reader's attention to the importance of time and what's on the other side of it (or whenever), it seems worthwhile to trace the narrative present through the course of the chapter. So:
>

What is on "the other side of time"? And when, exactly, is "on the other side of time"? Pynchon often uses metaphors that describe temporal processes in terms of space. The phrase "kingdom of death" would be only one prominent example.

> Mirror-time
>
> We are introduced to the concept of mirror-time as Rachel sits in Schoenmaker's waiting room. She occupies herself studying a double-faced clock that is mounted in front of a mirror on the wall. She can see both the face of the clock that is turned to the room, and in the mirror the reflection of the second face, which seems to be running backwards. She (or anyway the narrative voice-it's not really clear if all of this is happening in Rachel's head or if she is in a scene being described to us by an omniscient observer) speculates that real-time and mirror-time might cancel each other out. Or that mirror-time might offer "a promise of a kind" of a "reversal of fortune" that drew people to this place to have their imperfections corrected. It is worth noting that these observations are made through a character whose name means "mirror," while she sits in the waiting room of a plastic surgeon with patients who are particularly sensitive to what's on the other side of the looking!
>  glass.
>

The regular movement of the clock corresponds with the branches that whip "back and forth in the February wind, ceaseless and shimmering" (46) as Terrance has noted. The wind, as everybody knows, turns up in Pynchon again and again, not only in this chapter or in V. It is, in other words, a leitmotif of Pynchon's fiction. Here the wind is associated with the mechanical expression of linear, scientifically subdivided time, i.e. the clock. The image hints at a correspondence between natural and mechanical processes. No simple opposition there. The wind, it has been said before, is "inanimate": "Dewey's voice sounded like part of the inanimate wind." (30) At that moment Dewey is sitting, perhaps not accidentally, on the crosstrees of the Susanna Squaducci, singing the French para's haunting tune, i.e. a song Paola learned from a person that was "built like the island of Malta itself: rock, an inscrutable heart" (19), but also a person also who was "tired" of committing atrocities in
Algeria.

The main characteristic of the wind in these chapters is that it doesn't care about humans or humanity. It just blows. It blows over the bums looking inside the V-Note: "All night the February wind would come barrelling down the wide keyway of Third Avenue, moving right over them all: the shavings, cutting oil, sludge of New York's lathe" (59) and over Charlie Parker: "Since the soul of Charlie Parker had dissolved away into a hostile March wind nearly a year ago (...)" (60) And, as you mentioned, it has "its own permanent gig" outside the bar at the very end of the chapter. The wind is not only inanimate, it is also permanent. It will still be blowing when everybody inside or outside the V-note bar is long dead and gone. I tend to think that this makes the vague correspondence between the sounds coming from Sphere's ivory horn and the wind a very high compliment for the musician.

As part of the yo-yo imagery the wind also is related to Benny's feelings towards Rachel - and we might remember that in M&D the wind is described as "a vector of desire" or something like this.

The "promise" of mirror-time is that it might be possible to reverse the historical facts, the things that have happened in linear, scientifically subdivided time. The clock running backwards is explicitly linked to the hope of Schoenmaker's patients that the certainties - here: the nose one has been born with - may become possibilities again. By this the mirror-world also is related to the realm of imagination and put in opposition to Isaac Newton's clockwork universe.

Of course there are also socio-psychological factors that create the longing for a "perfect return", in this case the desire of people marked by one bodily feature as members of a specific minority. It is the wish to have a bodily appearance that does not distinguish one from the people who form the ruling class or mainstream of society. This is the subject of Rachel's discussion with Schoenmaker (the name is indeed that obvious). Fanon's studies concerning the wish of black people to be white also comes to mind. The desire reveals itself as an expression of an induced minority complex, but it is certainly not less real for this.

Just a few thoughts.

Thomas