VLVL2 (15): Yurok and Tsorrek

[dedalus204 at comcast.net]

379.11:  "As he drove, Vato told an old Yurok story about a man from Turip, about five miles up the Klamath from the sea, who lost the young woman he loved and pursued her into the country of death.  When  he found the boat of Illa'a, the one who ferried the dead across the last river, he pulled it out of the water and smashed out the bottom with a stone.  And for ten years no one in the world died, because there was no boat to take them across . . . All these voices, forever."


"The Yurok tribe settled at the mouth of the Klamath River and the Pacific coast. They spoke a language of Macro- Algonquian, closely related to many of the dialects of neighboring tribes. The Yurok’s lived in villages in the winter and wandered in bands in the summer. The Yurok villages consisted of small rectangular structures made of cedar posts and poles and split cedar planks. These homes were owned by individual families. Along with these houses came the rights to such privileges as fishing, hunting, and gathering. These villages also had sweathouses that served as dormitories for the men, as well as small separate women’s menstrual huts. The traditional dress of the Yurok men included a deerskin loincloth and deerskin moccasins with elk hide soles. The women wore knee length deerskin skirts that were heavily ornamented." [...]

http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/northamerica/yurok.html

http://www.californiahistory.net/2_natives/yurok.htm

http://www.native-languages.org/yurok.htm


The "story" in the passage has echoes of the ancient Greek underworld and Charon, the boatman of the River Styx:

http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Underworldmap.html

http://www2.bc.edu/~betancur/dorecharon.jpg

http://members.lycos.co.uk/willard/Dore.jpg


Also note:


[...] "The world of Vineland is marked by a culture of reruns, and thus also by a ritualized and quite literal déjà vu, as each childhood is largely structured by the tubal input which remains constantly retrievable ever after. Children and adults are thus shaped by the same experience, in which the past and the present are to some extent fused - the endless repetition creates a kind of timelessness. (As a matter of fact, a childhood which is extended into adult life is one of the significant features in the culture of the Yuroks, the native Americans of the Vineland region (cf. Becke & Vanderbeke 1992, 63-76) – and it might be of interest here, that one of the standard texts on Childhood in America contains a chapter on the Yuroks and was written by Erik Erikson" (4) - the surname should ring a bell in the context of Vineland.)" 

[...]

"But Pynchon ends his novel with an unexpected twist. The mythical landscape of the native Americans itself succeeds and overcomes the forces of evil, if only temporarily. On the last pages, the villain is led to the land of no return, to Tsorrek, the Yurok version of Styx, the river of the dead. The road to Tsorrek can open anywhere, i.e. all roads finally lead to the same destination, and so many have walked this road that it is trodden deep into the earth. The familiar image of time as a garden of branching paths, i.e. of endless possibilities, is turned into its opposite, an image of the irreversible processes leading to death. The question of general history is replaced by the inevitable conclusion of life. With the death of the villain the book may end on an unfamiliarly happy note (at least in the context of Pynchon's novels), but this is balanced by the rather grim image of the unhappy hereafter, which, after all, seems to be a place in Arcadia."

http://www.diss.sense.uni-konstanz.de/amerika/vanderbeke.htm