Monk's motto or: Is Against the Day in favour of the Night?

[Paul Mackin]

On Jul 25, 2007, at 12:01 PM, robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:

>
> And now some 'technical data' concerning my reading process:  I'm  
> on page
> 270 of the recent translation of Marcel Proust's "The Prisoner',  
> the fifth book
> of "In Search of Lost Time". It's tough, right about now.  I  
> stopped to read
> Against the Day a couple-two-three times, and looked at all the  
> other books
> that were picked up for background on AtD, and all those other  
> books that
> cross my path during my seventh year as a worker bee at a Borders.  
> So I've
> got distractions a-plenty. Right now, M. de Charlus is being an  
> insufferable
> bitch, and I never really went for full-tilt costume docu-drama  
> before anyway.
> Proust's got a thing for mauve---dare I say that he adopts a  
> precious turn of
> phrase, from time to time and sometimes altogether too, too much?   
> But I
> persevere, because there were unexpected payoffs in the previous  
> four and
> really, truly the man is an exquisite author, particularly on the  
> subject of
> music and the heart.
>


In questions of the heart and sexual jealousy, Proust seems to stand  
in direct antithesis to Pynchon.

Is there a single instance in AtD where the kind of  jealousy so  
strongly exhibited by Swann, Charlus, and the narrator see even a  
glimmer of daylight?

Yes, Dally does broach the question, though negatively. She accepts  
the attentions of Clyde Crouchman because he is NOT one of those  
complexos.
He does not require any kind of faithfulness or exclusiveness in his  
partner.

And so it goes throughout AtD.  Isn't it remarkable how consistently  
Pynchon depicts the socialist ideal of collective ownership as far as  
male-female and same-sex relationships are concerned?

P