The Hole Truth

[David Morris]

Very nice, Dave, and to the core of Pynchon's use of the comedy/fantasy.  He 
is truly after magic.

And if anyone is in Chapel Hill, NC the exhibit "Reason and Fantasy in an 
Age of Enlightenment" at the Ackland Art Museum is also highly relevant:

http://www.ackland.org/art/exhibitions/reasonfantasy/index.html

In 1778, at the end of a long career as writer, critic and political 
activist, Voltaire was portrayed by the sculptor Houdon. Enthroned on a 
simple but elegantly decorated chair, Voltaire personifies the eighteenth 
century as the age of Enlightenment. With a quizzical smile and penetrating 
gaze, the image radiates skepticism and common sense. We see a venerable 
elder, free from irrational fears, superstitions and passions, whose flowing 
robes equate him with the philosophers of Greek and Roman antiquity

Yet if this image can be used to typify eighteenth-century enlightenment, so 
can another famous portrait from the very end of the century. Goya’s The 
Sleep of Reason produces Monsters seems like the antithesis of Houdon’s 
sculpture; instead of meeting our eyes this man buries his face in his arms, 
while owls, bats and a staring lynx suggest the irrational visions that 
trouble his sleep. But it would be wrong to see him as Voltaire’s opposite – 
his reason may be asleep at the moment, but when he wakes he will take up 
the crayon that one of the owls is offering him and use reason to encompass 
the irrational by portraying it, for this is the artist Goya himself.

Fantasy, whether in the form of irrationality or creative imagination, is as 
much a part of the eighteenth century as reason. Voltaire himself was a far 
more complex and passionate individual than the calm sage portrayed by 
Houdon. Again and again in the art of the century we see reason and fantasy, 
common sense and folly, order and disorder confronting one another. The 
complexities and contradictions of the eighteenth-century spirit will be 
explored this spring in the exhibition Reason and Fantasy in an Age of 
Enlightenment.

>Dave Monroe:
>
>From Toni Schlesinger, "The Hole Truth," Village Voice
>Educational Supplement, Week of April 17 - 23, 2002
>...
>The book starts there because for the last 300-plus years, the supernatural 
>in Western culture has been found in the grotesque. To understand how the 
>supernatural is represented in modern secular culture, we have to go back 
>to the grotto and the origin of the motif.
>
>[...]"To go higher, you must first go lower. . . ."

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