MDDM Ch. 56 Vortex

[jbor]

I guess I'm coming at it from the point of view of discourse analysis. As it
stands Emerson's negative exclamation about "Vorticists" and his belief that
they are the "very Legion of Mischief" (556) does refer to the
Newtonian/Cartesian rift, and so it makes sense in terms of the way that the
literary narrative has been articulated here. But if there's a definite
reference to Vorticist art or to Wyndham Lewis in this one word then what's
the reference actually saying at the discourse level? To pose this query in
a different way, which of the narrative agencies is making the reference,
and to what ends? I guess I was just hoping for a bit more of a case than
the word and a couple of links (though these are interesting in their own
right). I'm not comfortable with any proposition that Pynchon is inserting
these references gratuitously.

Mind you, I'm not discounting this sort of thing entirely. I'd compare it
with the apparent reference to Eco's _The Name of the Rose_ on p. 559,
which, in my reading of the novel, does operate on two levels, as a
plausible element in M & D's conversation/story and as a doff of Pynchon's
authorial cap to a literary masterwork written by one of his contemporaries.
But the anti-"Vorticist" comments of Emerson don't really have the same
potency at that metafictive level, for me, anyway, and in fact could seem to
indicate antagonism rather than acclaim if they *are* to be read as
anachronistic allusion.

Just as an aside, I think that the addition of "Shakespeare's *Tragedy of
Hypatia*" to Eco's "Secret Shelves" is quite a telling one, in regard to
Pynchon's attitude towards Christianity and his self-perceived role as a
"heretic". 

What I get from Gertrude Stein's work (and Bakhtin and Reader Response
theory) is that there can be no definitive closure on linguistic or
discursive "meaning", but that it is just as likely to be the reader who is
imposing the semantic connections as the author of the text. Lexical
coincidences (eg. homonyms, homophones) do exist in all languages, and at
all levels of language. They are certainly rampant in English, as Stein (and
Joyce, in _FW_) show. I think some of the puns in _M&D_ (eg. the
"sari"/"sarong" exchange on p. 479) demonstrate, among other things,
Pynchon's consciousness of this fact.

I'm saving this essay for after the read, but it looks particularly
interesting on this issue:

http://www3.oup.co.uk/alhist/hdb/Volume_12/Issue_01/120187.sgm.abs.html

best


on 9/6/02 2:45 AM, O.SELL at telda.net at O.SELL at telda.net wrote:

> I'm not that sure if you can say that so definitely.
> What did P. write in somewhere in GR:
> "Coincidence, another fairytale word."
> 
> Carving my way through Gertrude Stein has showed me that there are hardly any
> "lexical coincidence(s)" in High Literature, though in the present cause I
> cannot give evidences of any kind.

> On _Tarr_:
> http://www.gingkopress.com/_cata/_lite/wl-tarr.htm
> 
> Otto
> 
>> Date: Fri, 07 Jun 2002 07:32:53 +1100
>> From: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
>> Subject: Re: MDDM Ch. 56 Vortex
>> 
>> It's perhaps fairer to cite the whole thrust of the original poster's point.
>> As Brian McCary mentioned, "the primary reference is Descartes", and any
>> suggestion that there is a deliberate allusion to Wyndham Lewis or Vorticism
>> as a movement in 20th C. abstract art on Pynchon's part isn't really borne
>> out by the context of the reference in the novel. From the earlier post:
>> 
>> [...] But Emerson, a
>> Newtonian, would have been slagging off the Cartesian
>> opposition. Under vortex we have, M17, 1 a In Cartesian theory: any of
>> the rapidly revolving collections of fine particles supposed to fill
>> all space and by their rotation account for the motions of the
>> universe; the whirling movement of such a collection of particles, usu
>> in pl M17, b Physics A rapid motion of particles round an axis; a
>> whirl of atoms, fluid or vapour [contrast that with earth, water, air
>> and wind]. The Vorticists being the Continental school of philosopher
>> scientists under Descartes and then Leibnitz, the English camp, under
>> Newton, supporting an alternative theory of indivisible Atoms. Both
>> camps, assuming as a first principle that Nature abhorred a vacuum,
>> had to account for how space was filled by matter, yet still left
>> enough room for it to move around. The vorticists assumed these whirls
>> of varying sized lumps of matter whose swirling motions added up to
>> the gross motions of objects at our coarser level of perception. The
>> Atomists assumed matter reduced to minimal size components which were
>> free to move around in open space. They accounted for the filling of
>> this absolute space by assuming a propertiless substance called the
>> ether which filled the space but through which atoms could freely
>> move. [...]
>> 
>> Vorticist artworks and Wyndham Lewis are interesting in and of themselves of
>> course, but I don't quite see that there's a case to say that they are
>> relevant here, or to Pynchon's work in general. To my thinking the use of
>> the term "Vorticism" is nothing more than a lexical coincidence.
>> 
>> best