VV(12): Siege

[Dave Monroe]

>From W.T. Llhamon, Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in 
the American 1950's (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 
Ch. 6, "'Keep Cool, But Care,'" pp. 193-25 ...

All the novel's historical glimpses of modern life are about siege.  
Instances of siege enact Pynchon's assessment of how modernity felt to 
moderns; ho, feeling embattled, they withdrew into pure cases; why, having 
withdrawn, they systematized their shrunken space to export it abroad; how, 
profiting from distant cultures, they looked for Keys to all Mythologies 
that would justify their colonialism.  The siege party at Foppl's farmhouse 
in South West Africa, the siege of feminine Malta, the children surrounding 
the dismantling of the Bad Priest (V.'s final incarnation) within the siege 
of Malta, the brute knifing of Boticelli's Venus to lift her from her frame, 
the Rape of the Chinese Virgins in chapter fourteen--all these are 
continuations of the same principle.  They are in Wittgenstein's terms 
sketches of the same landscape.  They are versions of "the virgin who is 
tortured to death defending her purity against the invading Mongolians" 
([V., p.] 396).  The virgin's imperiled purity is the major theme of 
prestigious high modernism from "The Waste Land" to Greenberg's Art and 
Culture. (206)

When the did not have what Fausto emphasized as "plots" ([V., pp.] 319, 324) 
of Italian bombers besieging them, modernists invented Mongolian manqués.... 
  Siege was so crucial to their self-definition that they invoked its 
presence far and wide, in their colonies ... and in their capitols ....  In 
Pynchon's analysis, the quintessential modernist location is to be caught, 
besieged by actual or fantasized cretins or cretinized lore. (206-7)

This squeeze, siege, choke or contraction happens at a certain stage of the 
lore cycle, when the once-rising lore passes its apogee and resists its 
descent.  The squeeze shapes the lore group and confirms its identity on its 
way up.  On its way down, the group celebrates images of the squeeze as its 
ennobling heritage, thereby prolonging its sense of identity. (207)

And by the way, Happy Birthday, Sergey Diaghilev!  Cf. M. Itague ...
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