SLSL: Robert D. Newman on 'Low-Lands' (part 2)

[Michel Ryckx]

The dump is situated fifty feet below street level, a "low-lands," which 
Flange associates with a Scottish sea chanty:

    A ship I have got in the North Country
    And she goes by the name of the Golden Vanity,
    O, I fear she will be taken by a Spanish Gal-la-lee,
    As she sails by the Low-Lands low.

In descending from the perspective of his house above the sea to that of 
the dump at sea level, Flange attains an epiphany through his 
observation of the borderless expanse of debris:

"Any arrival at sea level was like finding a minimum and dimensionless 
point, a unique crossing of parallel and meridian, an assurance of 
perfect, passionless unifirmity; just as in the spiraling descent of 
Rocco's truck he had felt that this spot at which they finally came to 
rest was the dead centeer, the single point which implied an entire low 
country.  Whenever he was away from Cindy and could think he would 
picture his life as a surface in the process of change, much as the 
floor of the dump was in transition: from concavity or inclosure to 
perhaps a flatness like the one he stood in now.  What he worried about 
was any eventual convexity, a shrinking, it might be, of the planet 
itself to some palpable curvature of whatever he would be standing on, 
so that he would be left sticking out like ap rojected radius, 
unsheletered and reeling across the empty lunes of his tiny sphere (65-66)."

The flat perspective allows him to project his imagination without 
limitation.  The civilizing process, however, is equated to the piling 
of debris on the dump site, a process that alters the flat and creates 
the "convexity" that is at the root of Flange's fear.  Like the Mondrian 
angles that preside over the solitutde of his sleep, civiliezed 
rationality imposes immediate horizons on the free and open perspectives 
of his fantasy life.

Flange's recognition permits him access to his alter ego, or 
doppelgänger, as he awakens to a siren voice calling, "Anglo, . . . 
Anglo with the golden hair.  Come outby the secret path and find me" 
(72).  He leaves the shack, but knocks over a stack of snow tires 
arranged byy Bolingbroke as a booby trap for gypsies.  His revival from 
consciousness is accomplished by a beatiful, three-and-a-half-foot 
"angel" named Nerissa, suggesting both Portia's maid in The Merchant of 
Venice and a mythical sea nymph.  She the nleads him through a network 
of underground tunnels emanating from a backless GE refrigerator to her 
home.  The underground complex, he learns, was built in the thirties by 
a revolutionary group called the Sons of the Red Apocalypse and has been 
occupies by gypsies since their demise.  In her abode Flange encounters 
per pet rat, Hyacinth, a forerunner of the rat Veronica in V.  Nerissa 
reveals that a fortune-teller named Violetta had foretold that Flange 
would be her husband, and the story concludes with Flange deciding to 
stay. v He looks at Nerissa and he sees sea images: "whitecaps danced 
across her eyes; sea creatures, he knew, would be cruising about in the 
submarine green of her heart" (77).  His transformation into his fantasy 
world is complete.

The references to Eliot's poem are numerous.  Joseph Slade argues that 
Flange is the Phoenician sailor who travels in the wasteland.  Violetta 
is Madame Sosostris, and Nerissa the Hyacinth girl who offers renewal. 
[4]  The conclusion of the story also suggests the vision of the 
mermaids at the end of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." However, 
Prufrocks dream life fails to redeem him, while Flange's fantasy offers 
a positive alternative to the mundane void of his life with Cindy.  His 
vision of Nerissa and the rat as children counterpoints the sterility of 
his marriage, with the resultant conviction that "a child makes it all 
right.  Let the world shrink to a boccie ball" (76).  This image, drawn 
from Marvell's "To his Coy Mistress," indicates a commitment to life 
rather than a retreat.  In this sense Slade's argument that the story is 
statis is fallacious. [5]  Instead, Thomas Schaub's contention that it 
possesses an hourglass shape, so that the ending becomes an inverted 
mirror of the beginning, appears more accurate. [6]  Flange's descent 
into the underworld of his fantasy life is a return to the imagination's 
primal wellspring, unencumbered by the sharp angles of rationality that 
had previously punctured his security."

(pp. 15-22),

and referring to:

[2] Tony Tanner, Thomas Pynchon (New York: Methuen, 1982) 31.
[3] David Seed makes this asture connection in "Fantasy and Dream in 
Thomas Pynchon's 'Low-Lands,' " Rocky Mountain Review 37, 1-2 
(1983):61.  John O. Stark discusses the self-reflexive nature of the 
stories within the story in Pynchon's Fictions (Athens: Ohio University 
Press, 1980): 161-65.
[4] Joseph W. Slade, Thomas Pynchon (New York: Warner, 1974) 28-31.
[5] Slade 25.
[6] Thomas H. Schaub, "Where Have We Been, Where Are We Headed? A 
Retrospective View of Pynchon Criticism," Pynchon Notes 7 (Oct. 1983): 
12-13.