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

[Tim Strzechowski]

> 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).

Which, of course, is similar to the ancient underworlds depicted in
Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, etc. For the ancients, there was no separation.
True "punishment" evolved later (let me qualify: "punishment" existed in
ancient descent narrative, but only insofar as mankind wronged the gods;
punishment for man against man was a later development).


> 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).

The Sister Rochelle allegory reminds us that Hell's "original promise was
never punishment but reunion, with [...] Earth Unredeemed" (383), a very
Native American notion that parallels their cyclical vision of life and
death.  But it doesn't negate the fact that our final glimpse of Brock is as
he is preparing for the physical alteration that he will experience in this
new realm, surrounded by "otherworldly" beings (i.e., primatives).  It's
important to note that Pynchon is giving us a pretty balanced vision of
Brock's descent: immersion into Earth (Native American), yet physical (and
perhaps emotional) discomfort (western European).  No, it's not the pain of
a contrapasso, but dis-ease nonetheless.

>
> 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.

It probably is.  His fate at the hands of the "third-worlders" is the icing
on the cake.

Tim