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

[Mark Kohut]

Yes, I think TRP is using ideas of The Thing and Lovecraftian images and plot points BUT
  Is he not trying to "explain History".....say more/something other/......than Lovecraft?
   
  I think that, as with everything in Pynchon, the "levels" or Reality matter a lot......and IMHO
  he is always pointing to a 'real Reality"---and who it effects.
   
  I think he is categorizing 'readers" with the adventure stories, etc. as out of touch with "reality."  
   
  We know from GR that he put down words on paper as........an abstraction....
  So, here....unreal are the adventure stories so.....no insight into "reality"....
   
  MK
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  

Jasper <jasper.fidget at gmail.com> wrote:
  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.



 
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