MDDM Ch. 68 Immanuel Ice/Charon

[jbor]

Otto wrote:

>> 659.27 The Ferryman's Grief is immune to Time - an allusion to Charon? to
>> Chris de Burgh?
>> 
>> http://www.pantheon.org/articles/c/charon.html
>> 
> 
> "Don't pay the Ferryman until he gets you to the other side"
> 
> Compared to the other musicians/composers this would make me wonder.

Yeah, I was only joking on that one. (I was even tempted to link the mention
of the river "Styx" to the band 'Styx' as well, even though it's obviously
inapt - sometimes these things *are* just lexical coincidences.) I couldn't
dig anything up in Graves or elsewhere on Charon's back story, however, to
check whether his family were all killed like Immanuel Ice's, but I think
the allusion to the ancient myth is pretty clear here (especially with the
stuff with the sixpence toll). The other thing which struck me was that Mr
Ice says "Not since Westphalia, such Evil." (661.32) I suspect, but can't
say for sure, that he's talking about the so-called Peace of Westphalia in
1648 (actually an accumulation of treaties) which effectively ended the Holy
Roman Empire and set up Europe's political borders for 150 years or more.
It's a very odd analogy if that's it.

Also, if Mr Ice is Charon then the Youghiogheny River would be the Styx,
instead of, or as well as the Monongahela, wouldn't it?

Mason's reference to himself as Prospero (_The Tempest_) is also interesting
in the contexts of Pynchon's pluralist mythography, the notion that the
whole narrative (and the event which it represents) is just a staged drama,
and Mason's development as a character.

best