VLVL2(1) Missed Communications: Beginnings

[Michael Joseph]

Thanks for your complex response. Sorry for replying belatedly. I'm afraid
the sacred is a heavily contested category and my reference was a bit
short-handed. The Eberle book may be a little watery for you, though he's
better on clock time. The sacred I meant comes from Mircea Eliade, who
drew on a range of sources, including Rudolf Otto, Husserl, and Bergson.
Hiss Myth and Reality (which I've excerpted for an online course on myth
in children's literature at
http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/special/mjoseph/eliade.html), is a good
starting point, although you might find discussions of Eliade that
interpret him within a more contemporary context more useful, in which
case try Bryan S.  Rennie's Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of
Religion (Albany UP, 1996), which I also "sampled" for the same course
(http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/special/mjoseph/rennie.html)

One could summarily say that the sacred is whatever is perceived to be
real, to have "explanatory power," to transcend the smallness of one's
historical situatedness and cultural position, to exist independently of
the evanescence, relativism, unpredictaiblity and unforeseeableness of
temporal events, the retentions and protentions of time; and of course it
necessarily depends upon (what Rennie describes as) an uncritical apriori
positive valorization, and thus implies a mode of consciousness and/or an
effect (one can't help thinking Hollywood and "special effect") of an
intentional act (Husserl) toward an object in the world or a unit of
sense.

For Eliade, the notional sacred is inextricably bound up with myth, the
ritualistic repetition of exemplary patterns, which are intended to
manifest the sacred by reactualizing originary events, and hence to annul
time (the Aristotelian sense). The paradigmatic myth is cosmogonic, which
reactualizes and explains the creation of the cosmos, and sort of occurs
at the level of Husserl's transcendental "I", the success of which
accomplishes Joyce's atavistic wish to escape history. ("History is a
nightmare from which I'm trying to escape.") I believe, while I wouldn't
go so far as to say Vineland is about escaping time, that this is one
important aspectival reading of it, and touches other readings in
ways that I hope are meaningful.

For example, the hotly disputed question of Zoyd's "work" can be
considered in terms of myth. Every year Zoyd enacts a birth ritual,
hurling himself through (an interestingly intact) hymen. (Work as an act
of ritual labor.) (We see this as a "coincidentia oppositorum" symbol of
birth/death later when it is explained that the falling fragments of glass
were like large daggers that could have killed Zoyd. Even acolyte
mythographers will see that Zoyd's failure to die the sacrificial death
might explain his failure to reactualize Vineland as sacred time.

The fact that this labor ritual occurs at the ostentatiously phallic
"Cucumber Lounge," adds to our good, mythographical, sense of the act's
primordial importance. The conspicuous placement of the labor myth at the
beginning of the text, where it partly provides a symbolic echo of Zoyd's
infantile, dozy awakening, tells us, I think, that Pynchon wants us to
take this symbolism at least somewhat serious, and, if we do, I also think
we begin to see a careful pattern:  Various characters make similar
attempts to reactualize the sacred behavior of exemplary beings in the
hope of transcending the" horizon of the earlier and the later."
(Aristotle)

Needless to say, Zoyd's metaphorical birth does not reactualize Sacred
Time (except that, as you observed, it does move the reader into the
strange time of the book, Vineland).  The sacral Vineland is ultimately
actualized (mythographically speaking) by the death/sacrifice of Brock
Vond (who functions in the text as Zoyd's "tanist weird" (Robert Graves)
(google "tanist weird graves").

Anyway, that's pretty much the way Eliade's sacred serves to elucidate
imaginative literature. I think for those who like it it's a powerful
interpretive system, depending upon a more creative hermeneutics, and
diverging from the ideologically based historicist criticism that has
dominated literary discourse for about the last forty years. I'm sorry to
go on so long, and will sign off now with one final comment.

I think Tim's brilliant perception of the signficance of "missed
communications" would be germane to a mythographic interpretation of the
opening, and of the text overall, within an Eliadean context. According to
Eliade, it is precisely because of a failure to perform the ritual
behaviors transmitted from in illo tempore that humanity is condemned to
suffer and die. (See my "A Pre-Modernist Reading of The Drum: Chinua
Achebe and the Theme of the Eternal Return" Ariel, A Review of
International English Literature 28:  (1997): 149-166.) Thus, arguably, it
is Zoyd's divergence from the prescribed ritual, which echoes and further
problematizes his cognitive failure to receive the text conveyed by the
*ordinary* (flying rats, as Terence noted) pigeon (authorial self-parody,
partly transgressive of the modernist notion of author as God). (For
further indication of Pynchon's use of bird symbolism as sacred
messengers, with perhaps a subtle suggestion of exemplariness, consider
perhaps p. 271, "Brock following every move of Roscoe's stuck like a
shadow, till they made it to the chopper and rose so sweiftly, like a
prayer to God, like a pigeon to the sky. . ..")


Michael

P.S.  Thanks for recommending the email notes of Terrence and Bandwraith.
I think we must always respect the depth and originality of Pynchon's
"presencing" of the world;  his take on any number of things is bound to
be worthy of contemplation, and having a set of readers who are engaged by
different aspects of Pynchon's work is really the beauty part of this
group.

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Paul Nightingale wrote:
>
> Thanks, Michael.
>
> I hadn't really thought about it in terms of sacred/profane, which I
> know from Durkheim's work on religion and that's about it (I think).
> Research has just turned up Gary Eberle's Sacred Time and the Search for
> Meaning (2003). It looks interesting: is that what you mean?
>
> I did start with the difference between natural and clock times, or
> cyclical and linear time, all of which is based on an essay by EP
> Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism". First
> published in the 1960s, the essay is an example of history-from-below of
> the kind that has influenced P (eg the Luddite and Sloth essays, as well
> as VL and MD). That is, EPT describes forms of popular resistance at a
> time when workers were being disciplined to accept clock time generally
> and factory hours in particular (something of a travesty, I know, but
> it's quite a lengthy essay).
>
> In a passage that prefigures P's Sloth essay (as cited recently by
> Bandwraith), EPT writes: "The work-pattern was one of alternate bouts of
> intense labour and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their
> own working lives. (The pattern persists among some
> self-employed--artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with
> students--today, and provokes the question whether it is not a 'natural'
> human work-rhythm.)" He goes on to discuss Saint Monday (sometimes
> followed by Saint Tuesday).
>
> Well that certainly describes Zoyd: he'll do it at his own pace, and to
> hell with imposed deadlines! Of course he always does make his deadline,
> but resistance is all about performance. Cf Tim's comment on the fig
> that requires care: laziness is something we might opt into, and then
> out of again.
>
> It (the passage from EPT above) also describes much of the work (labour)
> that is featured in VL, so Terrance is right to say the novel is about
> work. Furthermore, a refusal to bend to the demands of a straightforward
> linear narrative is characteristic of P's writings, most certainly in
> VL, where the storytelling meanders where it will, and takes as long as
> it will (which he then justifies in the Sloth essay a few years later).
>
> EPT also cites Bourdieu's study of Algerian peasants in the 1950s. B
> writes, in a beautiful phrase: "Haste is seen as a lack of decorum
> combined with diabolical ambition", going on to note that the clock is
> sometimes known as "the devil's mill". One might describe Brock Vond in
> the final pages of the novel as, well, hasty.
>
> Anyway, moving away from the opening, briefly, I think
> resistance-as-performance is central to VL as a whole and links
> late-Pynchon to late-Foucault, ie the Foucault of governmentality and
> the knowing subject: Frank Palmieri's paper, "Other than Postmodern?
> Foucault, Pynchon, Hybridity, Ethics", is particularly useful in this
> respect.
>
>
>
>