Webb Traverse

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Chris Broderick:

>What I'm curious about is the linguistic freight of
>the term 'Jeshimon'.  It just strikes me as a nice
>piece of pseudo-biblical westernism, but I confess
>ignorance.  I'll admit that the whole section made me
>think of Cormac McCarthy, particularly the parallel
>between the governor in AtD, and the judge in Blood
>Meridian.  For what that's worth.

I also thought of McCarthy as I read the Jeshimon section, and since we know 
that Pynchon read and admired 'Blood Meridian', the comparison seems 
absolutely fitting.

For what it's worth, though, I thought even more of Clint Eastwood's western 
'High Plains Drifter' (1973) - his tribute to Sergio Leone:

http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=1:22387~T0

In that movie, which has sometimes been described as a 'magical realist 
western' (also an apt description of the western sections of AtD), Eastwood 
plays some sort of otherworldly avenging angel who arrives in the town Lago 
(which, incidentally, means 'Lake'), and is hired by the citizens to protect 
them from a band of outlaws. Eastwood's nameless character agrees, but he 
goes about his task in a strange way. For one thing, he instructs the 
citizens to paint the entire town red, and he subsequently renames the town 
'Hell'. And it's eventually revealed that the 'hero's' real motive for 
helping the citizens is one of personal revenge. (In this 1973 movie he also 
appoints a midget sheriff - quite an unusual appointment, but also quite 
familiar to readers of a famous novel from the same year: see GR pp. 
534-35).

The comparison between the Jeshimon sequence of AtD and McCarthy's 
apocalyptic 'Blood Meridian' is probably much more sound than the tenuous 
connection between Pynchon's novel and Eastwood's western, but as a result 
of the revenge motif, the Lago/Lake-coincidence, the significant renaming 
and repainting of the city (a-and that Pynchonesque midget sheriff!), each 
time I read the word 'Jeshimon', an image of the infernal city from 'High 
Plains Drifter' pops before my mind's eye.

_________________________________________________________________
Få 250 MB gratis lagerplads på MSN Hotmail:  http://www.hotmail.com