VLVL 98-103

[Terrance]

> (A good question might be, if writing and reading arise from the mirror,
> what does this mirror reflect? Where comes the light?)

All the shapes that have been reflected there--Pyncheon himself, and his
many descendants, some in the garb of antique boyhood, and others in the
bloom of feminine beauty or manly prime, or sadness with the wrinkles of
frosty age.  had we the secrets of that mirror, we would gladly sit down
before it, and transfer its revelations to our page with a mesmeric
process we could make its interior region all alive with the departed
Pyncheons; not as they had shown themselves to the world nor in their
better and happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or
in the crisis of life's bitterest sorrow. 


VL is not as good as V., but it's much better. 

 How did the Romance writers, how does Hawthorne
  for example, incorporate the static, stunning exactitude of
  photo art into the gothic elements of American Romance and
  comment on psychology/history? Mirror, mirror on the wall,
  carrying on a trope used in classical and medieval Romances,
  the American Romance relied on pictorial devices to question
  the relationship between life and art, original and
  imitation, subject and image. One would think that the
  stunning exactitude of such a medium would seem to render it
  anathema to a genre steeped in a gothic tradition, but,
  early views of daguerreotype endowed the medium with magical
  powers, making of its verisimilitude a magic realism.    
  Early in his career Pynchon begins using TV and radio and
  film, mixing them with dreams to destabilize assumptions of
  what is "reality" and developing his history/psychology
  themes. Now, while it makes sense that Pynchon should turn
  to film which emerged and flourished in America, the land of
  conquest of space and time, an art appropriate to the
  democratic New World, an art more dependent on the marriage
  of art and technology than any before it, an art vastly
  public, an art that took light as its medium, light that
  most elusive, most transient, most ephemeral of all
  phenomena. It makes sense that Pynchon, growing up when he
  did and setting his fiction in the 40s, 60s and 70s would
  take us to the movies and bring TV into our homes. The
  "movies" (the word itself is dated 1912) was said to have
  the power of "making us walk more confidently on the
  precarious ground of imagination." However, those sprockets
  on the page in GR are not found in V.. We find a member of
  the sick crew wired to a TV between a dream and a waking
  state. We find characters like GR's Franz ("Franz loved
  films but this was how he watched them, nodding in and out
  of sleep.") In "The Secret Integration," written between V.
  and CL, Pynchon mixes dreams and radio as he had in V., and
  yes in CL we find an old man that mixes dreams, Porky Pig
  cartoons and History, and Pynchon carries the planetarium
  motif from V. to CL as a major structuring technique, but in
  V. and "TSI" and CL Pynchon does not use film as it is used
  in GR. V. uses the literary precursor of pictorials (photos,
  paintings, drawings etc.) the MIRROR. The mirror and the
  clock, not film, is what Pynchon uses in V.. So Melanie's
  personality of narcissistic reflection and voyeuristic
  relationship with V (hall of mirrors/sex roles) is worked
  out in GR by Katje and her solipsistic cameraman's
  (pornographic sex roles) pleasure as the personality of
  pretense. Kurt Mondaugen has a cameo role back in the same
  section in which Franz sleeps and watches movies in GR. In
  V., Mondaugen become a voyeur, dependent upon images
  reflected in mirrors and he enters "mirror-time in the
  south-west Protectorate," where history is nostalgically
  reflected--the history of genocide (1904). What happens to
  Mondaugen is that his dreams ("the dreams of a voyeur can
  never be his own")take on the history/psychology of the
  novel. Pynchon has him get sick first, a technique he will
  later use in "TSI" where the very sick Mr. McAfee will
  recount his history in much the same manner as the radio
  fragments that filter in the boy's dreams. During his
  illness (scurvy, ick, the sick skin of V. ice) he is visited
  by images of genocidal brutality, the overflow of Fopp''s
  infected memory and fancy. He is also visited by our dear
  friend Weissman, reflected in a mirror, who tells him that
  he is able to interpret the sferics as "Die Welt ist Alles
  Was der Fall ist." The mirror has magic, mystical power in
  V. and with the clock it forms part of the overall structure
  of V.. I think Pynchon use of mirrors, radio, sferics in V.
  is rooted in literature and his use of film develops from
  his use of these others. "

  "Everyone's gone to the Baseball, now we're alone at last."