V.V. 3--Time, place, and mirror-time
Don Corathers
crawdad at one.net
Sun Oct 29 17:47:58 CST 2000
Observations and questions for discussion
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:
February, 1956, beginning at about 1:00 on the same afternoon Benny, Angel, and Geronimo got drunk and went girl-watching in the park at the end of Chapter One. Back a few hours to Rachel's 10 a.m. appointment. Forward to the park again. Back to a September conversation in Slab's apartment. Forward again to Rachel's present, toward the end of her walk home. Fast forward through the afternoon to six o'clock, when Rachel leaves the apartment. To later that evening, at a party in Fergus Mixolydian's apartment. Back, through Stencil's consciousness, to 1946 and other points in his personal history, sliding smoothly forward to his most recent arrival in New York about a month ago and again to the present of Fergus's party, which continues into the morning. The chapter ends "close to closing time" at the V-Note, which would probably be about 3 a.m.
We are also given quite precise locations for much of the action:
--Walking north in Riverside Park, from somewhere in the 80s to 112th St. (Query to, uh, middle-aged New Yorkers: would this have been before construction of the Henry Hudson Parkway?)
--Schoenmaker's office, between First and York, which runs from the 50s to 92nd. Where's Germantown?
--Slab's apartment, at an unspecified address.
--Rachel's apartment on 112th St.
--Mixolydian's apartment, unspecified.
--A villa on the western coast of Mallorca.
--The V-Note, Bowery and Third Avenue in the East Village.
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.
(Terrence and Dave Monroe each had a nice post on Schoenmaker's clock and mirror-time a couple of weeks ago, and I would encourage them to repost those now.)
Later there's another take on mirror-time. We are shown Paola's clock at 6 p.m., as the minute hand "passed twelve and began its course down the other side of the face; as if it had passed through the surface of a mirror, and had now to repeat in mirror-time what it had done on the side of real-time." This very carefully rendered detail comes at the end of two lovely paragraphs of observation that include "the almost imperceptible sounds of Rachel fixing her long hair." (Presumably she is watching herself in a mirror as she does this.) It recalls not only the clock and its reflection in Schoenmaker's waiting room, but also the sun, our original clock, split with a mirror in the apocheir paragraph on p35. Paola's clock might be read to suggest another alternative definition of mirror-time: that mirror-time is night and real-time is day, since mirror-time begins when the minute hand passes the 12 at six o'clock. (One might also wonder, if the hands of the clock pass through the mirror, how does one know which is the real and which is the reflection?)
With all this reflective glass around, it hardly seems coincidental that the events of Chapter Two mirror the events of Chapter One rather nicely. Chapter One opens in a bar, moves to a party, and ends with Benny hanging out in Riverside Park. Chapter Two, if you disregard the flashbacks, opens with Rachel walking past the precise point where Benny was when One ended, then there's a party, and it ends in a bar. (Later, in another kind of mirroring, Esther opens Chapter Four by retracing the crosstown trip Rachel has just made as Chapter Two begins. And early in Chapter 5, Benny makes the same trip underground, chasing an alligator.)
Don
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