VV(1) - The Inanimate & some Qabalistic skylarking

[Thomas Eckhardt]

> This leads me to wonder about the universe of "V." in a Qabbalistic
> sense. (I am about to go *way* off the deep end here. Feel free to
> ignore me; this hypothesis is shaky at best, but may nevertheless
> interest a few people.)
>

snips of a whole lot of interesting observations and speculations

Are there any references to the Qabbalah in V.? I remember that there are
pointed Qabbalistic references in GR (I did not have the time to reread the
book for GRGR). But the Qabbalah is certainly not endorsed by the narrator as
a valid scheme of universal order in GR, is it? More likely it is one of
those systems of thought and belief humans erected against chaos (a very
stereotypical assumption, I know)? What has always struck me as a decidedly
qabbalistic image is the ending of that one particular really, really
wonderful and incredibly sad passage in Vineland which happens to come just
after the symbolic betrayal of the hopes of the 60s by means of the
camera/gun: "(...) the spilled, the broken world" (267).

What I am trying to say is perhaps, text fetishist that I can be, that to
look at V. in terms of Qabbalah to me seems different from looking at GR or
Vineland from this perspective - assuming that there are indeed no or no
significant explicit references to Judaic mythology in the text of V., which
I am far from being sure of. The first would be archetypal criticism assuming
that Greek/Christian/Hermetic/Judaic myth can determine the text without the
author's conscious knowledge (a kind of memory of the genre - I fear that I
am being rather Fryesque here again, but methinks he is right), the second
would be based upon the instances of references to belief systems in the text
and would have to closely examine how exactly the respective system or myth
is treated.

As for the splintered vessels of creation as "a common Pynchonian/Qabbalistic
theme", could you point me to some more instances?

Thomas

P.S. Sorry to be so analytical, and thanks a whole lot to you and David for
your great posts - and not only for keeping up the discussion of V. in times
like these, in a world like this...