Day the Next. p. 317 ff; the Deep Read, AtD(11) June

[Mark Kohut]

Tore---
   
  What a web of parting finds and obs.......you have made it all 'connect' on this theme.....
   
  I think TRP, as your documentation shows, is very full of poignant sentiment--or sentimental---about parting...but he does believe in focussing on it.....so
   
   important to AtD.
   
  MK

Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:
  Thanks for some fine ad hoc-hosting, Mark.

Yesterday you singled out this bit:

>317: Dally goes East.....Touching scene or 'off''...not TRP's strength?

Depends which day you ask me.... If I'm in the right mood, this scene is 
very touching and may even bring a lump to my jaded throat, but other days 
it may appear, as you say, a bit "off". What struck me about the scene is 
how much it resembles other scenes of parting (which is such sweet sorrow, 
remember) in AtD. Take for instance Kit's parting with his Ma:

"I'll never see you again." No. She didn't say that. But she might've, so 
easy. A look from him. Any small gesture of collapse from his careful, young 
man's posture back into the boy she wanted, after all, to keep." (AtD, 106)

Or Hunter's parting with his mother:

"She looked to every horizon, taking her time, saving south for last. Not a 
wisp of smoke, not the last, wind-muted cry of a steam siren, only the 
good-bye letter waiting this morning on her work-table, held now like a 
crushed handkerchief in her pocket, in which he had given her his heart -- 
but which she could not open again and read for fear that through some 
terrible magic she had never learned to undo, it might have become, after 
all, a blank sheet." (AtD, 137)

Or Cyprian's and Danilo's parting:

"They embraced, but that was the formal version, for their embrace had 
happened long before." (AtD, 847)

Or Wren's and Frank's parting:

"I'll say hello to the girls on Market street," she said, and though their 
kiss went on for what could have been hours, so little did it have to do 
with clock time, she was already miles away down those rails before their 
lips even touched." (AtD, 930)

A-and the list could go on. Read in isolation, these scenes of departure 
seem to work just fine, but read in conjunction with each other, it also 
becomes clear that they work in very similar ways (touching, with a subtle 
little twist at the very end), and retrospectively this similarity almost 
makes them seem a bit mechanical, at least to my ears (notice, for instance, 
the penultimate "after all" in my first two examples, or the similar way in 
which the embrace and kiss in the last two examples are displaced in time, 
as it were).

There may be some deeper point to the similarity (double-refracted scenes of 
departure), or Pynchon may just have decided to work hard on his scenes of 
the sweet sorrow of parting and come up with a number of more or less 
similar paragraphs which he then distributed evenly across the vast 
landscape of his novel, hoping they would bring the desired readerly lumps 
to readerly throats.

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