ATD the norse/nunatak/serpent/odialesque thing

[John BAILEY]

My first reading of AtD impressed upon me a real sense of the importance of portals in the novel, though I really wasn't sure what to do with them. Kit's desert Arch made the connection for me, since it's telegraphed ominously before he actually arrives there.
 
Cyprian's spiritual metafiguration requires that he pass through an arched gate too, and I recall thinking that both Reef and Frank do the same at various (nodal) points in the novel. I'm pretty sure Frank's happens during his little Carlos Castaneda bit in Mexico.
 
My current thinking is that it ties in with the idea of History narrowing to inevitabilities, always a bad thing in P's writing, a field of possibilities always preferable to a necessity. All of the multiverse stuff, the co-existence of incommensurate worlds, genres, timeframes (AtD reminds of Nabokov's Ada in this regard) might seem like a bit of an abstract cop-out, imagining what could have been (but wasn't), but this emphasis on portals seems hint that between the open field of the past and the future, there are sometimes tiny narrow points we have to pass through, and when we come out the other side we'll be different, or at least feel ourselves to be entering a different landscape. You can't look back through these gates.
 
Perhaps its just choosing to pass through a gate that changes someone. The passage, crossing a threshold, as a symbolic act. That's what I got from Cyprian's closing scenes, anyway.

________________________________

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Mark Kohut
Sent: Sunday, 1 April 2007 10:00 PM
To: Tore Rye Andersen
Cc: pynchon -l
Subject: RE: ATD the norse/nunatak/serpent/odialesque thing


These are brilliant obs which I feel just on the verge of "getting"...[smoaking in M & D]...
Yes, portals are everywhere...have we or the wiki "cataloged' them all-----I'm checking the wiki....
and more relate to time than space,k it seems....but they do co-relate...like co-consciousness?

I was confused over the 'some ancient catastrophe: far older than the City.....
I thought two things:
1) There have always been and will always be catastrophes 
2) The 'ancient catastrophe was such as losing our natural relation to the world?
 
????
Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:

	Ya Sam:
	
	>If NY was destroyed by the Figure in some other dimension, maybe the arch
	>encountered by the Chums may serve not only as the reminder but also as a
	>portal into that dimension, provided you have the necessary knowledge how 
	>to
	>use it.
	
	Yes, that struck me as well: there are certainly plenty of 
	windows/portals/doorways into different dimensions in AtD, and the Dante 
	portal may very likely be one of them. The word "transition point" (used 
	about the portal on p. 154) is never an innocent one in Pynchon's novels. 
	M&D is filled to the brim with bridges, ferries, etc., and the words 
	"transition" and "passage" are very frequent in that novel. St. Helena, for 
	instance, is described as a "Transition between Two Worlds" (M&D, 180), and 
	in that allegorical description of Mason and Dixon on the Atlantic Ocean, we 
	hear this:
	
	"They are content to reside like Ferrymen or Bridge-keepers, ever in a 
	Ubiquity of Flow, before a ceaseless Spectacle of Transition" (M&D, 713)
	
	The theme is of course also predominant in AtD. The Dante arch, e.g., is 
	mirrored by the giant Arch Kit passes through on his way into "shamanic 
	Asia". His passing through that arch (see pp. 768-771) is one of my 
	favourite passages in AtD. After passing through/making the transition, Kit 
	has a dream/vision, where he himself becomes "the bridge, the arch, the 
	crossing-over" (771).
	
	If the Dante arch is indeed a portal, what exactly is it a portal into, 
	though? Another dimension, or another time? Of course, the line between 
	dimensions and time is a fluid one in AtD, but it seems to me that the 
	emphasis in the description of the Dante arch on p. 401 is on time: "They 
	approached a memorial arch, gray and time-corroded, seeming to date from 
	some ancient catastrophe, far older than the city." This seems puzzling, ne? 
	The catastrophe is caused by the ancient force of the Figure, but the 
	catastrophe itself is surely not ancient. Or is it?
	
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