VV(4) - Horus on the Horizon

[Terrance]

Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> ... but speaking, as you were, Terrance, of devils, deals, not only did
> I recently clear my palate of that godawful Bedazzled remake with the
> delightful (really) Stanley Donen/Dudley Moore/Peter Cook original, not
> only am I reminded that someone, somehwere is now working on a big
> screen The Devil and Daniel Webster, but am also reminded of another
> interesting possible reference my friend had pointed out to me, i.e.,
> Edgar Allen Poe's Toby Dammit ("Never Bet the Devil Your Head") as a
> possible inspiration for Thomas Ruggles Pynchon's Benny Profane (er,
> V.).  The name, of course, but see also the story, conveniently online @
> 
> http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/POE/neverbet.html
> 
> Some interesting metafictional commentary there, pluys, apparently, a
> critique of American Transcendentalism.   "NBTDYH" was filmed by
> Federico Fellini as "Toby Dammit" (starring Terrance Stamp) for the 1968
> portmanteu film, Spirits of the Dead.  As always, let me know ...


This work is generally considered a failure. The cause of
its ill-success is certainly
not to be sought in its lack of power. None of Melville's
novels equals the present in
force and subtlety of thinking and unity of purpose. Many of
the scenes are wrought
out with great splendor and vigor, and a capacity is evinced
of holding with a firm
grasp, and describing with a masterly distinctness, some of
the most evanescent
phenomena of morbid emotions. But the spirit pervading the
whole book is
intolerably unhealthy, and the most friendly reader is
obliged at the end to protest
against such a provoking perversion of talent and waste of
power. The author has
attempted seemingly to combine in it the peculiarities of
Poe and Hawthorne, and
has succeeded in producing nothing but a powerfully
unpleasant caricature of
morbid thought and passion. Pierre, we take it, is crazy,
and the merit of the book is
in clearly presenting the psychology of his madness; but the
details of such a mental
malady as that which afflicts Pierre are almost as
disgusting as those of physical
disease itself. --Philadelphia Graham's Magazine, October
1852

And if the critics calling Mr. Melville a madman was not
enough to drive him to silence
what his friends would write about his fiction and his
immoral moral would. Gives one pause, I should hope, when we
see the industry desperate for a new approach digging  deep
into the hot soil where Nat's plant shot its seeds or
creeping about on the stairs with forensic scientists.    

The most immoral moral of the story, if it has any moral at
all, seems to be the
impracticability of virtue; a leering demoniacal spectre of
an idea seems to be
speering at us through the dim obscure of this dark book,
and mocking us with this
dismal falsehood. Mr. Melville's chapter on "Chronometricals
and Horologicals," if it
has any meaning at all, simply means that virtue and
religion are only for gods and
not to be attempted by man. But ordinary novel readers will
never unkennel this
loathsome suggestion. The stagnant pool at the bottom of
which it lies, is not too
deep for their penetration, but too muddy, foul, and
corrupt. If truth is hid in a well,
falsehood lies in a quagmire.
--Evert or George Duyckinck, in New York Literary World,
August 21 1852


Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> ... "the Shadow and Peter Schlemihl"? 

                    
By GR Light and Shadow are Gnostic complexities that the
young man that wrote V. and the short stories hadn't quite
seen the light and dark of. 


GR.394  "from above and below at the same time, so that
everyone had two shadows: Cain's and Abel's."  And this same 
narrator says GR.429, "In the Zone, all will be moving under
the Old Dispensation, inside the Cainists' light and space:
not out of any precious Golleri, but because the Double
Light was always there, outside all film, and that shucking
and jiving ...in deep ignorance, then and now, of what he
was showing the nation of starers...so that summer Isle
passed herself by, too fixed at some shaodowless interior
noon to mark the intersection, or to care."  

The Supernatural 

The trend toward the irrational and the supernatural was an
important component of English and German romantic
literature. It was reinforced on the one hand by disillusion
with 18th-century rationalism and on the other by the
rediscovery of a body of older literature—folktales and
ballads—collected by Percy and by German scholars Jacob and
Wilhelm Karl Grimm (see Grimm Brothers) and Danish writer
Hans Christian Andersen. From such material comes, for
example, the motif of the doppelgänger (German for
"double"). Many romantic writers, especially in Germany,
were fascinated with this
concept, perhaps because of the general romantic concern
with self-identity. Poet Heinrich Heine wrote a lyric
apocryphally titled "Der Doppelgänger" (1827; translated
1846); The Devil's Elixir (1815-1816; translated 1824), a
short novel by E. T. A. Hoffmann, is about a double; and
Peter Schlemihl's Remarkable Story (1814; translated 1927),
by Adelbert von Chamisso, the tale of a man who sells his
shadow to the
devil, can be considered a variation on the theme. Later,
Russian master Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky wrote his
famous novel The Double (1846), an analysis of paranoia in a
humble clerk. 

http://www.levity.com/mavericks/romantic.htm

http://www.ctheory.com/a61.html


In 1814 Chamisso published the peculiar tale of Peter
Schlemihl, which, more than any  other work, won lasting
recognition for its author. The story of a man who sold his
shadow to the devil, it 
allegorized Chamisso's own political fate as a man without a
country. Though rewarded with an inexhaustible  purse,
Schlemihl soon discovers that the lack of a shadow involves
him in unexpected difficulties. He refuses,  however, an
offer to restore the shadow in exchange for his soul and
instead, with the help of a pair of seven-league  boots,
wanders through the world searching for the peace of mind he
has bartered away.

http://www.britannica.com/seo/a/adelbert-von-chamisso/

Among Hoffmann's longer works are ELIXIERE DES TEUFELS
(1816), which studied the theme of doppelgänger. Alternate
personalities or their shallow equivalents, can be found in
'Die Abenteuer der Silvester-Nacht'  (1815), where a man
meets both the
shadowless  Peter Schlemihl and Erasmus Spikher, who has
lost his reflection. LEBENS-ANSICHTEN DES  KATERS MURR
(...), a fictional autobiography   of a cat and a direct
parody of Goethe's The  Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister,
was published in two volumes in 1820-21. Hoffmann wrote nine
operas and one
symphony, his opera  The Water Sprite is still occasionally
performed.  Other compositions include vocal, chamber, 
orchestral, and piano works. Hoffmann died in Berlin from
progressive paralysis on June 25, 1822. - His tales, which
weave the fantastic  closely into real world, had enormous
influence particularly in the United States, where his works
affected the writings of Washington Irving, Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. 

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hoffman.htm

Poe is, of course, the great-great-grandfather of the genre
Pynchon is playing with here in V. , Dickens of course,
revived it after it had died. 

Someone asked about a summary of these chapters? Well the
best one is the one provided by the host. 

If you don't mind reading "vicariously", you could read
chapter 2, ("Duplicity And Duplication in V.")   of Molly
Hite's book Ideas of
Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon, an excellent study I
happen
to mostly agree with but  disagree with, Postmodern you
know, ha, ha, but it does go to the questions you  raised--
what the hell is going on in this seemingly fragmented
non chronological narrative?



It's wild the way postmodernism's discourse gets
rootlessly wrapped around everything these days, that Benton
article I so admire in the OCULR on anarchy for example,
which, when it does finally get to Pynchon, (not a
criticism, anarchy is a huge subject) identifies the
paradoxical, irreconcilable binary, the  chaos and order 
(Hite),  the "creative source of both political revolution
and violence &  freedom and 
even and annihilation as creation, also addressed  in
that OCULR by Francisco Collado-Rodriguez in his essay on
the Excluded Middle. 

On the Baedeker tourism and stage--Rilke's actors, acrobats,
film, see William M. Plater's book, The Grim Phoenix:
Reconconstructing Thomas Pynchon. 

The James Wood essay, James Wood, The smallness of the "big"
novel.. , is in the The New Republic,  07-24-2000. That's
July 24th not July 7th.