FW: VLVL "the old Yurok story" (379-80)

[jbor]

umberto
> the Yurok 
> story conflates elements of Dantesque geography of Hell and the
> Orpheus myth. 

I don't agree that the Yurok story was influenced by Dante, the Orpheus
myth, or T.S. Eliot, is all, and I don't agree that Pynchon was necessarily
pointing to Dante or Eliot in his appropriation ("ransacking", in your
words) of the Yurok myth. It's the reader who is doing the conflating here
and, as I pointed out, parallels could as easily be drawn to the Egyptian
Book of the Dead or the Epic of Gilgamesh as to these others.

If we're talking about authorial intention, I think it more likely that
Pynchon saw the Yurok myth standing in its own right (it is Yurok country he
has set the episode in, after all, and there are quite a few references to
Native American history and culture elsewhere in the novel, though none to
Dante or Eliot), rather than as a screen for a European classical or
literary allusion, or a Biblical allusion for that matter.

best