ATDTDA (5): Mythmaking, 149-155 #2

[Jasper]

On Sun, 2007-04-01 at 05:19 -0700, Mark Kohut wrote:
> On another of Paul's necessary insightful summaries-plus, with the
> title Mythmaking
> I want to ask/say this:
>  
> couple-three things we seem to know (about Pynchon's overarching
> myth-making)
> 1) He seems to have a positive vision of life, men and women, enjoying
> 'the days"
> together intouch with nature and their natural selves, natural light
> and darkness uncontaminated by technological 'stuff".
>  
> 2) It seems that one of Pynchon's influential books behind the vision
> of GR was Norma O. Brown's radical Freudianism in Life Against
> Death...(That title dualism is a pure Pynchon
> dualism even if he had never read the book)
>  
> 3) This Figure, a primal Destroyer is 'more ancient than the
> City'...'can't be defeated"....
> etc.
>  
> 4) A major concept of Freud's, the one Norman O. Brown stretched to
> its limit in L A D, is the concept of The Return of the Repressed....a
> psychoanalytic concept that says that---oversimplification
> alert!---when we repress, bury in our sub- un- conscious, natural
> aspects
> of our natures, our feelingful mind, etc. that they do not stay
> buried, they force themselves out in self-destructive ways....all
> kinds of ways from nervous tics through insomnia, to once-in-a-while
> rages, etc., etc.
>  
> Is this the Figure in Pynchon's mythology of History?
>  
> MK
>  
> 

I like the Figure = Great Old One idea we were talking about before the
group read.  It's one more aspect of the fictional multiverse P explores
in this book (sometimes -- other times not so much).  It's also other
"monsters" but to me mostly resembles Lovecraft's creations (Quail I
think also pointed to John W. Campbell's Thing legacy: "Who Goes
There?", The Thing from Another World, John Carpenter's The Thing).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Old_One

Again, I see the Chums as P's way of revisiting some of the genre-lit he
loved as a boy.  It doesn't matter if the various fictional worlds
aren't connected in any other way -- they're connected by the Chums, the
way different books and stories are connected by the reader.