poseurs in "pomographic magazines"

[Dave Monroe]

I'd like Terrance to explicate the Pynchon/Swift thing
myself (via Norman O. Brown's reading of Part IV of
Swift's Gulliver's Travels in his Life Against Death,
right?), if only because I haven't quite followed up
on it myself, but, in the meantime, also picked up ...

Ducornet, Rikki.  The Monstrous and the Marvelous.
   San Francisco: City Lights, 1999.

... for unrelated reasons, but, lo and behold ...

   "In Swift's universe, Time is female; female flesh
epitomizes dissolution.  Returning at the witching
hour of modnight, Corinna (The Progress of Beauty)
sits on her three-legged chair--in other words, her
bidet--and pulls off her hair and plucks out her eye. 
The passage of time accelerates to a dizzying degree;
like particles in an atomic canon, matter fractures
and dissolves.  Corinna's macabre striptease reveals
that she is in fact an upholstered coffin; tacks,
tassels and padding remove, all that remains is an
eager abyss.  (Eager because once abed, the hag lies
awake tormented by thoughts of love.
   "Corinna's glass eye is a species of genital; it
fits, after all, into an orifice and, with a glance
can 'glamourize'; like a phallus, pierce to kill....
the eye fills the absence that contains it....
Corinna's eye socket is her glass eye's casket, her
mouth a reliquary that contains her dead teeth, her
body melted down to an anamorphic spill." (p. 22)

"The descent into the female vortex culminates in the
revelation of that vile machine, that reeking chest,
Celia's own Pandora's box ..." (p. 23)

"This phallic eye is incarnated by Swift's
'Salamander.' ...  The organ of self-perpetuating and
self-punsihing anger, the phallic eye is also very
cold ..." (p. 23)

Cf. ...

"As the distance between them gradually diminished
Mindaugen saw that her left eye was artificial; she,
noticing his curiosity, obligingly removed the eye and
held it out to him in the hollow of her hand.  A
bubble blown translucent, its 'white' would show up
when in the socket as a half-lit sea green.  A fine
network of nearly microscopic fractures covered its
surface.  Inside were the delicately-wrought wheels,
springs, ratchets of a watch, wound by a gold key
which Fraulein Meroving wore on a slender chain round
her neck.  Darker green and flecks of gold had been
fused into twelve vaguely zodiacal shapes, placed
annular on the surface of the bubble to represent the
iris and also the face of the watch." (V., Ch. 9, Sec.
ii, p. 237)

And ...

   "Other children crowded round her head.  One pried
her jaws apart while another removed a set of aflse
teeth.  She did not struggle: only clsed her eyes and
waited.
   "But she could not even keep them closed.  For the
children peeled back one eyelid to reveal a glass eye
with the iris in the shape of a clock.  This, too,
they removed.
   "I wondered if the disassembly of teh Bad Priest
might not go on, and on, into the evening. [...]  I
lay prone under a hostile sky looking down for moments
more at what the children had left; suffering Christ
foreshortened on a bare skull, one eye and one socket,
staring up at me: a dark hole for the mouth, stumps at
the bottoms of the legs.  And the blood which had
formed a black sash across the waist, flowing down
both sides from the navel." (V., Ch. 11, p. 343)

Hm ... note that "'Are you alive.'"  Not quite a
question, and that moan "at the first bomb-bursts" not
quite an answer ... hm ... 

This, by the way, is tropologically a blazon, a
cataloguing of female bodily parts, see ...

Sawday, Jonathan.   The Body Emblazoned: Dissection
   and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture.
   New York: Routledge, 1995.

http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/Sawdayreview.htm

http://www.cx.unibe.ch/ens/lovehurts.html

http://www.cx.unibe.ch/ens/cg/lovepoetry.html

And on Jonathan Swift's The Progress of Beauty--here,
specifically, "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed"
(1731)--see, e.g. ...

http://www.geocities.com/soho/nook/7255/nymph.html

http://www.ph-erfurt.de/~neumann/eese/artic20/spoor/

And on Swift in general ...

http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/previctorian/swift/swiftov.html

But returning to Ducornet ...

"Gulliver's Travels is a collection of verbal
anamorphoses, its optical illusions the diversions of
a sensible observer who, although Bollingbroke
suggested it, refused to put on 'philosophical
spectacles.'  And just as Berkeley suggests that the
flea we see beneath the lens of the microscope is not
a new sort of thing but still a flea, so Swift's reply
to Bollingbroke is: Put on what Spectacles You please.
 Your Guinea's but a Guinea still." (p. 19)

"Like Hookes and Hogarth, Swift proposes inflation as
a way to the Truth.  Swift's Truth being very dark
indeed, the entire social fabric may be read as a map
leading to a mass grave ...." (p. 20)

"Throughout the Travels, Gulliver is like one who
gazes at a catoptric anamorphose and sees a skull and
his own reflection in the same instant ...." (p. 20)

On anamorphoses, see ...

Baltrusaitis, Jurgis.  Anamorphic Art.  Trans.
   W.J. Strachan.  New York: Abrams, 1983 [1955].

But much that is suggestive here, methinks.  Again,
never hurts to do a little browsing at the bookstore
...

--- Otto <o.sell at telda.net> wrote:
> Actually I never thought about Swift and Pynchon in
> one context but reading
> into the first two chapters of
> PART IV. A VOYAGE TO THE COUNTRY OF THE HOUYHNHNMS
>
> [...] 
>
> This goes with my general impression of Pynchon's
> use of literary sources,
> i.e. sources he wants us to take a look at.
> 
> Otto
> 
> >
> > Where's Terrance when we need him?  He seems to
> > have a line on Swift and Pynchon.

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