MDDM Ch. 70 Higher Assembly

[jbor]

on 18/8/02 1:11 PM, Dave Monroe at davidmmonroe at yahoo.com wrote:

>> ... and the Visto like a ribbon. Anachronism?
>> Jesuit balloons? Transcendental flight à la Dixon
>> and Emerson? God, or gods? Or is it that cosmic
>> eye view again ... "the magick of Celestial
>> Trigonometry" (96.7)?
> 
> Only a vantage point, and not necessarily a viewer, or
> a means for him/her to reach said point, simply, "from
> a certain Height."  This I vaguely recall as an
> unnerving but not uncommon narrative sleight-of-hand
> (or, at least, eye) in those Pynchonian texts

Yes, like the description in _V._: "If you look from the side at a planet
swinging around in its orbit, split the sun and imagine a string, it all
looks like a yoyo." (V. 35)

Of course, a vantage point is somewhere to view something from. If no-one
else, the reader is given this view, is the "viewer". Though the verb is
elided, it is implicit in the clause: "the last Cadre [ ... looks] oddly
verminous upon the pale Riband unfolding .... "

The frequent mention of surrounding mountains by the narrator in this
section: "Wills Creek Mountain ... Evitts Mountain ...the Allegheny Crest
... the Crest of Savage Mountain ... over the Ridge", the way that the party
has been "setting in the last Marks ... at all the highest Points in the
Visto" (681.16,18); and then the way the narrator describes how their
progress is being "watch'd from Cover at every step ... Ridge by Ridge"
(684.1-2); suggest to me that both the vantage point and the metaphors used
might be more palpable within the narrative than you have allowed.

best