Mortality...

[Terrance]

AMA = A.M.A. abbr. American Medical Association, 

The allusions simply crowd out characters and story or
something like that,  but the allusions are quite revealing
and might tell us a bit about P from  V. to M&D

Just a few things that pop out. 

There are several very good essays on P's Short Stories or
Slow Learners or Early Labyrinths. Hollander's are
exceptional. 

The sacraments are Roman Catholic. His interest in American
Indian culture is present too. 



Pigs. 

And Dada. 

Christmas Eve. 

The exhibit of 1919 where Pig/Mistletoe/ and Booze? A church
key
opens a dead soldier, at least in the Bronx and in Hell's
Kitchen it did. 

HELL. 

We meet Rachel (4'10" Modigliani neck, fathomless eyes
slanted both in one direction, and she is perhaps the name
for Destruction. 

We meet Siegel, sort of a Benny at age 30. 

John Buchan Hero. 

And P's first Double, Siegel's  Doppelganger is Lupescu a
Romanian, who is under the weather and a neurotic father
confessor to what 
seems to be a sick and "sinful" crew.  

The double allusion (in GR we have some triple allusions,
like Chaucer/Dante/Eliot) Here we have Baudelaire/Eliot.

And we have Ennui and Deliverance. 

Another tripple--Host Trinity (a) receiver (b) enemy, (c)
manifestation of the divine body and blood. 

The Holy Ghost, the third dispensation is a P obsession from
the Shorts to M&D. 

 Jew/Catholic (a seed of destruction and a House divided
against itself, NT) 

His Mother a Catholic, Siegel  a Stephen Jesuit--niether
kicked around nor ineffective nor Conscious of Guilt. 

The drug induced or sickness induced plunge into
subconsciousness (McAfee, Mondaugen, etc.). Here it is a 
hungover and  Rachel. Down into funky fathomless Rachel
subconsciousness. He feels jovial. Well, he is, after all, a
party Host, but P qualifies his emotions, splits them in two
directions (V)  as lightheadedness, perhaps the first stages
of hysteria or the nonchalance which had sustained him in
Europe. 

Limericks. Of course they have to do with Beaver. 

Beavers. 

Faust. 

Hemingway, Oak Park, Torero, eventually, as Robert noted, in
V. we get Hemingway's THEY. 

Klee. 

The Father Confessor is  Catholic/Jew-Freudian. In V. we get
the Dentist. 

Cyrano de Bergerac

Disease

Spoon talk, name dropping cant, Zen, SF, Wittgenstein,
Albert Magnus. 

Death personified, Loon, a memento mori. 

Cross talk language &  miscommunication. 

Native Americans. 

Don Giovani, exploits and conquests, Slothrop. 

James Dean

Bartok

Note, as in V. at the bus stop in Norflk, Rachel calls on
the phone
and provides direction and a little tug to the surface from
below. 

He is reluctantly excited to be a cog in the
Playboy/beauracracy. 

they  wear Tweed, Harvard, Concord, Radcliffe, Puritan,
Dissipation.  

Golden Rule: screw unto others as they will screw you. 

The daisy chain of screwers and screwees, this is more of an
existential Agon--V's destroyer and destroyed,  and is
refined in GR as S&M, we define each other and no way out
Norman O. Brown. 

Here is an interesting one: Healer/Prophet v. Fortune
Teller/Doctor/Zeit (Time) 

"out of the jungle" Kurtz Conrad--going native/Eliot

Tourists and disguises or costumes--Apache, Sailor. 

Puritans. 

Santayana. 



Note too the Winsome brat comes north from the
South--Virginia, kinda like Winsome in V.,  as does
Duckworth, the sailor with the
piggybacked very young girl who seems, to Siegel at least, 
to be a perfect parody of the 1940s Bohemian girl. She 
cheers
Siegel up when she introduces herself, saying, "I want to go
to bed
with you." But Siegel is cheered not by the prospects of
fornicating, or even by Lolita Lust, but by her sin/crime. 
Sorry, he  says, statutory rape and all...here have a drink
little
girl.  



>From his schickseh Mother, a Catholic, who delights in her
female cunning and   who refutes Aquinas while half in the
bag and in Hell's Kitchen (an immigrant neighborhood in
Manhattan, so named for the smells generated by the
cooking)  he inherits a gift for Subversive activities:
pantyraids, forged tickets, instigating riots, manipulating
public opinion, so he's 30 now and working in Washington. 
>From his Mother he has learned to fear of the cunning
Catholic schickseh, although Rachel, a nice Jewish girl
seems to have him on string of time regardless. 


It's a very bad story actually, but it does tell us quite a
lot about Mr. P's early reading and interests, many of which
continue to find their way into his fiction and prose. 

His ear was not too good, we can agree, but it got better. 

Some books: 


Sublime Enjoyment; On The Perverse Motives in American Lit.,
Foster

T.S. Eliot and AMerican Poetry, Lee Oser

The Utterance of America; Emersonian Newness In Dos Passos'
U.S.A. And Pynchon's Vineland, Dickson

American Declarations; Rebellion And Repentance In AMerican
Cultural History, Bush

The Dark Stain; The Role of Innate Depravity In American
Literature, 1620-1040, Mages

The Genteel Tradition ANd the Sacred Rage: High Culture Vs.
Democracy in Adams, James, ANd Santayana, Dawidoff

Inventing The American Primitive; Politics, Gender, And the
Representation Of Native American Literature, Carr

Love and Death in teh American Novel, Fielder, Intro by
Harris

Melancolia Americana; Portraits, Federspiel

Parables of Possibility: The American Need FOr Beginings,
MArtin

Patterns For America; Modernism and the Concept of Culture,
Hegeman

Reciting America: Culture And Cliché in Contemporary U.S.
Fiction, Douglas

The Puritan Origins Of American Sex; Religion, Sexuality,
ANd National Identity In American Literature, Fressenden,
Radel, Zaborowska editors




Thomas Eckhardt wrote:
> 
>  > 1.  What does mean '... and the whole AMA...' ?
> > 2.  Any speculations why it was not included in
> > 'Slow Learner'?
> > 3.  Where does 'Vienna' in the title come from?
> 
> 2. Too violent? Too many allusions, references etc.?
> 
> 3. The title is a quote from "Measure for Measure"
> I,1. The original context of the quote is important:
> The Duke of Vienna hands over his power over
> "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" to Angelo. A very
> similar thing happens in Pynchon's story. Unexpectedly
> Siegel finds himself in a position to decide whether
> the guests are to live or to die...
> 
> Thomas
> 
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