vv (7): archetypal alligators

[Lorentzen / Nicklaus]

                            "i'm showing tygers on my shirt and alligators/
                            you wanna see the inside? i'll see ya later..."

                                            (biggie smalls, 1997)


 the pynchon pioneer tony tanner (see "caries and cabals", in "city of words", 
 london 1971, pp. 153-180) wrote the following about our actual episode: 

  [once more i only can offer you the stuttering, clumsy, amateur   
  re-translations i'm typin' with these bear paws into my old notebook; the 
  german version, translation: bernhard matt, was printed in h. ickstadt (ed.): 
  ordnung und entropie. zum romanwerk von thomas pynchon. reinbek bei hamburg 
  1981: rowohlt, pp. 17-54, here 35f.] 

 "an important scene of action in the novel's multi-layered texture lies beneath 
 the street: the nyc sewer-system, in which benny profane hunts alligators and 
 in which father fairing tries to convert and to seduce rats. allusions to 
 sewers and tunnels do also appear in the descriptions of the outlandish country 
 vheissu and of the new york city subway. clues to the potential existence of an 
 inborn reservoir of archaic knowledge hint at c.g. jung. the idea that the 
 subconsciousness could be a nutrient substratum for art - even if it is 
 compared to an archaic waste water system - and the idea that diving into our 
 dreams can be meaning- and fruitful, has, in the meantime, become so common, 
 that one can understand pynchon when he's turning them into a farce. at the 
 same time, however, he suggests that life  b e l o w  the street could be, in  
 fact, much more real than the one  o n  it. [follows a minor spoiler!] when  
 benny, eventually, has to give up his job in the sewer-system, it says : 'what 
 peace there had been was over. he had to come back to the surface, the 
 dream-street.' (151)
    the widely ramified net of scenes (of action) resembles the labyrinth of the 
 human consciousness. the street is the zone of the wakeful, planning  
 consciousness which - unable to bear the meaninglessness of the present age - 
 makes planes for the future or detects such in the past. the hot house is the 
 closed region of remembrance, in which the memory loses itself in dreams about 
 the past. the sewer-system or the region beneath the street that is also 
 compared to everything lying beneath the surface of the sea, is the kingdom of 
 dreams, the subconsciousness, perhaps also the kingdom of archetypes, in which 
 one finds for a short time peace and forgetting. into this area the artist must 
 get, but fantasies may luxuriate in such an intensive way that one perhaps gets 
 to see rats as saints and lovers, when one stays too long there. all three 
 regions, anyway, illustrate the human urge to construct fantasies as if every 
 level of consciousness would be just another form of dreaming."


   soweit tanner. what to do with it? once i discussed this interpretation with 
 someone who was very much into pomo, especially decon and 'new historicism'. 
 and this guy questioned the fruitfullness of applying the jungian concept of 
 subconsciousness to the novel here. what do we need it for? he used to ask. 
 furthermore, he even considered this interpretation by tanner to be a typical 
 example of "modernist ontologizations" that damage the inherent 
 poly-contexturality of pynchon's prose ... well, folks, i'm divided: on the one 
 hand i think that tanner's thesis has some plausibility (like the 
 'subconsciousness', alligators - being reptiles - represent an early level of 
 evolution), on the other there is the danger of narrowing the space of 
 pynchon's universe through mono-contextural frameworks of interpretation.  
 perhaps this example of 'below the street=subconsciousness' could work as a  
 starting point for a new round of the now & then emerging pomo debate, but this 
 time - he he - in consideration of the actual pynchon text. what do you think?

kai  //:: ps: "... & ich bin kein böser mann/ich kann nur nicht mitansehen und 
              stillschweigend zukucken/wie mir irgendwelche tucken in meine 
              suppe spucken ..." (moses pelham)
  
              [means: i'm not an evil man; i just cannot tolerate it when people 
              try to damage my work.(metaphors and rhymes left out)]