VLVL: chapt 7, p. 92 real and fake

[Michael Joseph]

Paul, another exciting inroad into the text. Do you see any resonance of
Augustine's City on the Hill in the hillside description beginning this
chapter, and in this any suggestion of the Wayvones being a metonymy of
idealized America?  I can see this idea resonating with Otto's regarding
the ironic identification of the good family and la cosa nostra: American
"family values" are being equated with patriarchal control, and the City
on the Hill becoming a mafia seizin or stronghold--which the text offers
in several versions. [more responses interlined below]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2003, Paul Nightingale wrote:

> > Setting: The Wayvone Estate south of San Francisco "occupying a dozen
> > hillsides" in Mediterranean Revival style (popular in San Francisco,
> > 1920-1940s).

> It's perhaps worth comparing the way Pynchon constructs the opening to
> chapters that emphasise location, by which I mean Ch3 (22), Ch4 (35), Ch6
> (68) and Ch7 (92). Of course, there are many more locations, in-doors and
> out-of-doors, sketched in; but when the chapter begins with a passage that
> locates the setting specifically, as CH7 does ("a dozen hillside acres south
> of San Francisco" - 92) it might be worthwhile dwelling on the way Pynchon
> makes use of this particular convention (and makes use of it to locate
> characters).
>
> For example, in the context of a chapter dealing with Zoyd's resilience, the
> Gordita Beach house has "proved to be sturdier than it looked" (22). The
> "generations of paint jobs" are a way of recording a particular kind of
> history, the record left behind by people who have lived there. And then, of
> course, further on, the "Casbah topography that was easy to get lost in"
> (25) seems noteworthy, in context, given Hector's failure to turn/understand
> Zoyd.
>
True here in natural details as well as in the broad landscape:
"everywhere today, in honor of the bride, pale plantations of jasmine,
spilling like bridal lace, which would keep telling nose-tales of paradise
all night, long after the last guests had been driven home." I love the
way the Berkeley reference (tree, falling) is turned here, and the
slightly jarring inconsistency of "nose-tales"--tales are fictions, lies,
but noses cannot be lied to; (one has a nose for the news, one can smell a
rat, powerful odor of mendacity, and, for T, one has his nose to the
grindstone, etc.). Are nose tales lies that the undeceivable organ
approves as the truth? I interpret this to be saying about Paradise what
the Kerry farmer said when asked if he believed in fairies. "Oh, not
a'tall, not a'tall; but they're there." But yet the implicit suffering in
"pale plantations..."


> Ch4 begins with Zoyd's journey "up a ridge of as yet unlogged second-growth
> redwoods", which phrase might be juxtaposed to the "erased-enough trail"
> further down the page (35).
>
> Ch6 is located in "a pale humid Sun Belt city" with an "almost familiar
> name" where the anonymity of the shopping malls matches that of the teenage
> mall rats whose labour makes them economically viable (and which reference
> is a forerunner to the extended descriptions of labour history further on in
> this chapter).
>
> Ch7's opening, then, might be contrasted to the Gordita Beach passage (the
> description of a house/home) and also the description of changing/evolving
> locations (Ch6). The way Ralph Sr is 'discovered', so to speak, on-set is
> markedly different to anything that has gone before.
>
You've convinced me that we need to think further about the symbolism of
landscape and architecture; one recalls that the Vikings named Vineland
for the delicacy of its grapes, and the presentation of the Brunello di
Montalcino [an essence of a particular and luminous place, celebrated in
history and legend], destined for the "same porcelain fate" as the cheap
stuff to Ralph Jr. Grateful for anything else you might have.



Michael