TboneSE

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Thanks, Charles, for this and all the other great stuff.

I'd like to contribute a few random thoughts:

What do we gather from the fact that bones are an important element of
the plot of COL49 and that they also serve as a leitmotif in Eliot's
poem? The image as such and its association with death is hardly
original. Yet, we know that Eliot, from V. to M&D, is an important point
of reference for P's fiction. Furthermore, TWL is the source text in
English literature, so to speak, for a certain idea of modernity, that
is, modernity as "a heap of broken images", fragments shored against
ruins, rattling bones, rats etc. In essence, a spiritual desert. In TWL
the detritus of the past is just that - rubbish, waste - and there is no
transcendental meaning, no tradition, no master-narrative, as it were,
which would allow us to make sense of the fragments of the Old World,
except perhaps for the beauty of the poem itself. And it is no accident
that serious writers to this day feel the need to respond to TWL in one
way or another.

I believe that the notion of modernity as a waste land finding definite
expression in Eliot's eponymous poem is highly important for Pynchon, at
least as far as V. and COL49 are concerned. And I agree, if that's what
you are saying, that the thematic relationship between the texts shows
above all in the imagery (in V., of course, the Eliot reference is
explicit). Apart from the bones in the artificial lake, Mucho's
reflections upon used cars and their former owners come to mind (4-5,
Harper Edition). This is a wonderful passage (I am especially fond of
that "salad of despair"-metaphor) about waste (and, by the way, COL49
may be seen as the starting point of that preoccupation with waste in
US-American literature which has come into full bloom only recently,
no?). But Pynchon strips the subject of waste of the mythological
resonances Eliot's waste land still retains (yes, I know that we are
dealing with two different meanings of the word here, but I think the
conflation is justified). The passage is not about the collapse of
tradition, at least not openly. What might be perceived as miraculous,
i.e. sudden death in a car accident, explicitly has no place in Mucho's
musings, because he would be able to make sense of it. Instead, it is
the repetition that is important here, "endless convoluted incest", also
relating to Oedipa's sense of "shuffling back through a fat deckful of
days which seemed (...) more or less identical" (2). In COL49 the
monotonousness of contemporary existence, its rituals and repetitions,
becomes a characteristic feature of Eliot's spiritual desert of
modernity (there is a wonderful passage in Cortazar's "Hopscotch" in
which habit is described as a fire consuming us). Oedipa, just like
everybody else, wants to escape from this endless pattern of repetition.
And this seems to be where projection, solipsism and narcissm come in
and Eliot becomes less important...

Hoping this is making some kind of sense,
Thomas