VLVL2 (15): "a storied place"

[Tim Strzechowski]

382.22:  "[...] Sister Rochelle, as so often in the past, now socked Takeshi with another of her allegories, this time about Hell [...] 'So, over time, Hell became a storied place of sin and penitence, and we forget that its original promise was never punishment but reunion, with the true, long-forgotten metropolis of Earth Unredeemed."


The "history of Hell" is a long and complicated one, beginning with the Egyptian Book of the Dead and Gilgamesh's "voyage" to the Underworld, continuing in Western tradition through beliefs in Sheol and the Greek underworld, seasoned with the imagery of Job and Aristophanes, further fashioned by the imaginings of Dante and Milton and Goethe and Shaw and Sartre, and brought to life by two millenia of religious faith coupled with social and political manipulation of the masses.  A good overview can be found in

Alice K. Turner, _The History of Hell_.  New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0156001373/qid=1085802320/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-4613026-0535829?v=glance&s=books


However, the description in the passage also echoes that of Leif Ericson's Vinland, discussed eerlier in the group reading and described by Elaine B. Safer as

  "represent[ing] an opportunity for a new life in a land with rich woods, white sandy beaches, grapes and vines, and a good climate.  What was done with this opportunity in northern California is treated with grim humor throughout [the novel]."

(from Safer's "Pynchon's World and Its Legendary Past: Humor and the Absurd in a Twentieth-Century Vineland" in The Vineland Papers, pp. 46 - 67.)


So . . . is Pynchon drawing a parallel between twentieth-century America and this "true, long-forgotten metropolis of Earth Unredeemed"?

Vineland isn't about WORK.

It's about HELL.


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