MDDM Ch. 32 Twins

[John Bailey]

Twins seem to be a favourite of Barth: in 'Letters', 'Coming Soon!!!' and of 
course 'The Sot-Weed Factor' (includes a lengthy cross-cultural summary of 
the motif of twins in myth and history), and the excerpt below, which is an 
example of how far Mr Barth is from Mr Pynchon in actually discussing 
meanings and motivations in his works. I've heard his (Barth's) novels 
described as twins themselves, the first of each pair working to 'exhaust' a 
genre, the second to 'replenish' it.

But...I don't think that Pynchon uses twins as a metaphor, at least not in 
the same way. I doubt he would privilege 'geminity' without a healthy 
suspicion as to the problems of anything to do with dualisms.

But...it's interesting, that mention of geminity in a chapter dominated (at 
least to my mind) by the notion of a perpetual motion clock, which becomes 
suspiciously organic. Keeping in mind that this historical period sees the 
phenomenal spread of the philosophy of mechanism, "the doctrine that all 
natural phenomena are explicable by material causes and mechanical 
principles", also represented by Otto Mayr's evocative phrase 'The Clockwork 
Universe', and in V. where Shroud, I think, describes the way that, in the 
18th C, man thought of the human body as a clockwork machine, well, I think 
that clocks are something to watch in M&D, and it's not just the time 
element, but the very principles behind and promoted by the machinery 
inside. But what's inside this clock? That's the mystery, just as it's a 
mystery what's going on inside V., just as Vaucanson's duck was built full 
of holes so that onlookers could view the mystery of life inside, just as 
another Otto, Herr Rank, suggested that the essence of the uncanny was in 
not knowing whether the person you are speaking to is another human being 
or, thankyou Descartes, an automaton. We still don't know. Conversely, 
ascribing life to a machine is just like Dixon, isn't it. His insecurities 
are harder to spot next to a mass of neuroses like Mason, but they're there.

Mid-17th Century, Julien Offray de la Mettrie writes Man, the Machine, and 
gets in a lot of trouble. Lesser known is his Man, the Plant (it seems he 
couldn't make up his mind...or perhaps the difference between man and plant 
is one we've only decided on since...). That Ludd fellow is smashing 
machines, Weavers and Clothiers are having it out, and these battles recur 
in Pynchon's writing.

But....twins. Barth talks about twins as a closed system, mutual 
reciprocity. The 'real' twins of M&D, Pitt & Pliny, don't seem to be 
especially representative of this notion. But the perpetual motion watch, 
well, it's a closed system, and would require a mutual reciprocity of energy 
to function, with that endless deferral of, well, reality, just like the 
closed world of twins...but sometimes that real world doesn't want to be 
deferred, and so it eats you up, slurping you down like a noodle (I love 
that image).

>From: "Otto" <o.sell at telda.net>
>To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: MDDM Ch. 32  Twins
>Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2002 18:36:13 +0100
>
>"Who should be listening to a Tale of Geminity," explains Pliny, "if not
>Twins." (315.10-11)
>
>Once upon a time, in myth, twins signified whatever dualism a culture
>entertained: mortal/immortal, good/evil, creation/destruction, what had
>they. In western literature since the romantic period, twins (and doubles,
>shadows, mirrors) usually signify the "divided self," our secret sharer or
>inner adversary--even the schizophrenia some neo-Freudians maintain lies
>near the dark heart of writing. Aristophanes, in Plato's _Symposium_,
>declares we are all of us twins,* indeed a kind of Siamese twins, who have
>lost and who seek eternally our missing half. The loss accounts for
>alienation, our felt distance from man and god; the search accounts for 
>both
>erotic love and the mystic's goal of divine atonement.
>-----------
>*It may be that in fact as many as 70 percent of us are. See e.g., the
>chapter "The Vanished Twin," in Kay Cassill's _Twins: Nature's Amazing
>Mystery_ (New York, Atheneum, 1982).
>
>(John Barth: "Some Reasons Why I Tell the Stories I Tell the Way I Tell 
>Them
>Rather Than Some Other Sort of Stories Some Other Way," in: _The Friday
>Book. Essays and Other Nonfiction_, New York 1984, Baltimore and London
>1997, p. 3).
>
>
>




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