That Toiletship Rucksichtslos ...

[Terrance]

Thank you gentlemen, it was a good debate, I learned  a lot.
The troll is paranoia and some bad history. Perhaps we all
need a labor day holiday. 

A close reading of TRP's use of Mandalas in the novel
reveals what we discover by a close reading of all Pynchon
adaptations of conventional acceptation of Mythological ( in
Grave's sense) symbolism. So, a close reading, IMHO
(following Paul's Capitalization here)  does not support
Thomas Schaub's (and others, Cowart and Stark, for example)
claim that TRP's use of the Mandala in GR invokes some
"integrating force which spars with the disintegrating
forces of analysis, and is itself a symbol capable of
uniting both (as it unites all oppositions)."  As I have
argued here for a while, religious or mythical forms of
integration, as is the case in all other matters where
regigion/myth  (this is why analysis of TRP's "formative"
readings of Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald and
all those other "Catholics" is helpful) are invoked in GR,
have been secularized and profaned by analytic forms of
integration. In other words, THEY are secular/analytical
desecualrized avatars of the great big religious/mytholocial
history TRP builds his novel (not unlike Joyce) up from. The
problem is secular history, the postmodern if you want,
Modern condition. For Modern man, all attempts to integrate,
be it with Mandalas or social scientific theory--Freud to
Brown--do not provide what religion or myth once could. So
the integrative function of the mandala is now only a
secularized analytical mandala (Jung's mandalas, for
example) and is functions allegorically in GR, often to
expose Modern Man's inclination or disposition towards
Paranoid (there are several forms of Paranoia in GR, here I
mean Paranoia as epistemological process, the Modern Mind
with all its aggregated apocalyptic momentum)  processing of
experience. In other words it goes to one of the big themes,
the one that says that when Paranoid Modern Man attempts to
take refuge in myth or its symbols, rituals, and so on, his
attempts, his Quest, in counter distinction to the
historical questers (Tannhauser, Pig Hero and so on), is
secularized and leads to annihilation, first of the
self--scattered, community, and the Kingdom of Life. 

Pynchon-L by date

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From: Lycidas at worldnet.att.net 
Subject: Re: GRGR(22) - Summary 2 (stringless lyre) 
To: unlisted-recipients:; (no To-header on input) 
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 09:38:14 -0600 



Mark Wright AIA wrote:
> 
> Howdy
> 
> --- David Morris <fqmorris at hotmail.com> wrote:(,,,)That stringless lyre
> of the toilet.(...)
> 
> Reminds me of some recent post, I think, in which passing through the
> strings of a lyre was an example of the limitations of man ("A god
> could do it...) Was this Plato?  Socrates? Some Greek dude anyway. Here
> the Toilet is a lyre, through which Slothrop has passed before, but the
> toilet is a stringless lyre, which means, I guess, that Slothrop ain't
> a god.  As if we didn't know.
> 
> Still wondering what happens beyond the bend at bottom of the bowl,
> Mark

Well it's Plato Cave with a twist or two, but the direct
reference is to Rilke. 

During our theater/theatre discussion I noted that
Consciousness, as Pynchon portrays it in GR anyway, is a
kind of second falling-- postlapsarian Man on a quest to
Salvation is imprisoned in his own consciousness:  Mind (and
Mind is both Reason and Myth in GR) is cut off from the
world and is thus incapable of relating to the world
adequately or with any satisfaction and so with
pornographies (Faustian Science mixed with corrupt ions of: 
myth, mystery, magic, religious ritual, sacrament, oral
community rites, holy grail,  a plethora of quests for
"salvation" ) Man Narcissistically projects an Image of his
Solipsistic imprisonment onto the world. Pynchon never tires
of representing this narcissistic confinement, equating it
with history (mirrors in V.) and extending it to Solipsistic
history in GR (film). So Pointsman, the dogmatic Pavlovian,
is haunted by "the sound of the V-1 and V-2, one the reverse
of the other", because his spiritual mentor Pavlov
considered this type of association, which is manifest in
"irradiation" and "reciprocal induction", as the brain, in
the mind of history. (GR.144) Weissmann is affected by this
"pathology" since he holds on to a "Mirror-metaphysics."
"Self -enchanted by what he imagined elegance, his bookish
symmetries..." (GR.101) 

In the Theatre/theater discussion I posted some stuff on how
and why I think Pynchon attributes this "pathology" to 500
years of metaphysics (although he also traces it back much
further) and presents the historical and psychological
"pathology" as the German sickness, but I said, 

In a broader sense, these woes are caused by the human
mind--the subjectivity, the inwardly trapped mind that has 
separated what was once whole or unified so that human
experiences have become antagonistic.    

I included what I think are a few very important Rilke
passages:  


Creation sees itself with both eyes
Open. Only our eyes are turned inwards,
Walls of circumvallation,
Against our own free beginning.
What it is like outside, we only know from glimpsing
The faces of animals. As soon as a child is born
We turn and force him so that he sees
All forms inside-out, not the real, that real
That shapes the animal's face--free from death.
Only we see it; free creation has its decline behind it
And before it, only God. And when it goes, it goes
Into eternity, as the fountains go.
We have never, not even for a day,
Looked into the world, into which the flowers
Eternally open. The world always is,
Not our narcissistic nothingness,
But the pure, the open, that one breathes in and out,
Always knowing and desiring. In stillness, children....

This is fate: to be opposed
And nothing more
and always opposed....

So who was it that turned us inwards, so that we,
And all we make, assume the posture
Of imminent departure? He stands upon the final rise,
>From which he sees our spreading lowlands.
He turns and stops and waits.
And here we live and take our leave. (DE VIII)


For a momentary sign, a reason for
Opposition will be prepared--laboriously;
We notice it because it is so meaningful
To us. We do not know the contour
Of feeling, only what facts it causes. (DE IV 9-18) 

A god can do it. But will you tell me how
a man can enter through the lyre's strings?
Our mind is split. And at the shadowed crossing
of heart-roads, there is no temple for Apollo. (SO I, III,
1-4) (GR.625-626)

The Toiletship is full of mirrors, they face each other,
reflecting out "Into mirror space." In addition to
re-working V.'s mirrored time, Pynchon is also re-working
"Lowlands" here, organic house, moon, tilt of the earth,
ship at sea, but here the ship is tilted at the angle of the
earth (Fowler notes this I think), and it is built in a
mandalaic form and surrounded obviously by the chaos of the
sea. So we could see it as metaphor for the mind that cannot
penetrate the amorphous world about it and so it projects a
narcissistic one. The universe becomes a pornographic
solipsistic mind. This is contrasted, I think, with Earth's
magic mind, true return.



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