Mckinley figurehead

[Mark Kohut]

My first thoughts on the figurehead question are these: Lindsay is Master At Arms, authority upholder (with less forceful Captain) so he wants a geometric figure, like imposing a grid on a City, not Pynchon's favortie thing to do.
   
  Young Darby is the youthful unauthority figure--somewhat anti-authority so far as he resists Lindsay---eros-obsessed suckling. One of Pynchon's life-grasping types at this point. 

mikebailey at speakeasy.net wrote:
    I'm looking for paradigms for AtD - each P book has changed my interior life in a different way.  The set of verbiage and images is poured in, like pigment into a paint base, into the existing aesthetic/ethical/technical knowledge in my mind and renders it, well, different from before.  Or, vice versa?  

Right now I'm thinking about the argument over the new figurehead. Is it meaningful that the old, Mckinley ornament was scraped off by a new building in Chicago that hadn't been there shortly before? Could that be a token of the new labor movement? (besides being a foreshadowing of what is going to happen with the Campanile)
   
  It's interesting that Lindsay wants a geometric figure.  It might be easy to dismiss him as an officious prig, but I think he has depth and sensitivity. It is he who quests for a wife, despite not being in favor of a female figurehead at this juncture (ie, he wants a relationship).  Plus, he reminds me of some kids I knew - and liked - in high school band.
   
  OTOH, Darby's choice of a curvaceous female figure would be a choice like Dante's of Beatrice or Goethe's ("die ewige weibliche") and all these possibilities exist in the vacuum created by the destruction of the McKinley monument (connoting both Szolgosz's action, and perhaps a general growing reluctance to deify political leaders?) - so for the coloration wrought by the book in my brain, as I see it so far, the contention over what figurehead to fly behind is quite a deep one.
  I'm at work right now and can't even remember what they do arrive at...obviously need to read over
  




  
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