TboneSE

[calbert at hslboxmaster.com]

thomas e.:

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."

May I?..........I didn't want to give away the game yesterday........I was waiting to see what others might have to say about TSE.........

here is a key

The bones in COL49 "appear" in a fashion I would call "synchronicitous", to wit, in one form or another, they appear "across" both the narrative and "time".........this is an important "cosmological" notion......and we get a taste of it in TWL

consider

"Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenedies, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocketful of CURRANTS
C.i.f. London: Document at sight,"

lns 207-211

against

"Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls and deep sea swell
And the profit and loss. 
                        A CURRENT under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth"

Pynchon and Eliot share more than imagery and a fascination with detritus, they are both concerned with the "pre-apocalypse" as a repeating phenomenon of cyclical history......

lve,
cfa

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Mail2Web - Check your email from the web at
http://www.mail2web.com/ .