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

[jbor]

Cf. the earlier references in the novel to Yurok mythology and culture on
pp. 186-7 and p. 317.

It's noteworthy also that there is no separation between a "Heaven" (or
"Paradise"), and a "Hell" in Yurok mythography, and thus all the "good" and
"evil", "saint" and "sinner", "Elect" and "preterite" baggage that goes
along with the Christian death myths is irrelevant. "Tsorrek" is simply "the
world of the dead" (186) or the "land of death" (379). Further, the close
juxtaposition with Sister Rochelle's iconoclastic "allegor[y] ... about
Hell" (382-3) seems to me to confirm the text's resistance to a reductivist
Dantean or Biblical reading of these passages (or of those which relate to
the Thanatoids and their indeterminate ontological status).

It's not a "happy ending" for Brock but he hasn't been consigned in a
moralising way to some Christian "Hell" either. The withdrawal of his
funding is probably the more salient stroke of irony or poetic justice in
his demise.

Hector, on the other hand, who really is a likeable, considerate, and
essentially good-hearted kook, doesn't seem to be faring too badly at
novel's end.

best

> 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.