ATDTDA (5.2) - Constance Penhallow

[Tore Rye Andersen]

John singled out this passage from AtD:

>"From her ancestral home on an island just the other side of the promontory 
>from town, Constance Penhallow, now passed into legend, though not herself 
>ambitious for even local respect, watched the arrival of the Malus. When 
>required she could pose with the noblest here against the luminous 
>iceblink, as if leaning anxiously out of some portrait-frame, eyes asking 
>not for help but understanding, cords of her neck edged in titanium white, 
>a three-quarters view from behind, showing the face only just crescent, the 
>umbra of brushed hair and skull-heft, the brass shadow amiably turned 
>toward an open shelp of books with no glass cover there arranged to throw 
>back images of a face, only this dorsal finality. So had her grandson 
>Hunter painted her, standing in a loose, simple dress in a thousand-flower 
>print in green and yellow, viewed as through dust, dust of another 
>remembered country observed late in the day, risen by way of wind or horses 
>from a lane beyond a walled garden... in the background a half-timbered 
>house, steep gabling of many angles, running back into lizard imbrication 
>of gray slatework, shining as with rain... wilds of rooftops, unexplored 
>reaches, stretching as to sunset..."

Thanks for isolating this wonderful paragraph. The amazing thing is that 
there are so many passages like these, both in AtD and in Pynchon's other 
works; so many, indeed, that we may often pass them over in our eagerness to 
get to the next good passage, and the next... In his post about the 
beautiful passage on p. 70, Monte showed us how much can really be gained by 
stopping off once in a while and paying close attention to a single 
paragraph, and your post does the same for this amazing description of 
Constance Penhallow.

The paragraph is rife with connections to other passages in AtD and to other 
works by Pynchon, as you point out, and in answer to one of your questions 
I'm sure that Pynchon expects us devoted readers to notice these 
connections. I wouldn't go so far as to call Pynchon's novels one big novel, 
as others have done - the stylistic differences between e.g. M&D and GR are 
simply too pronounced for that - but it does make perfect sense to regard 
his novels as one big, densely interconnected textual universe, and part of 
the pleasure of reading a spanking new novel like AtD is tracing its many 
connections to Pynchon's other novels, locating its proper place within this 
larger textual universe. And I'm sure this is what Pynchon has in mind: his 
inclusion of not only themes and metaphors, but also characters from 
previous works (e.g. Bodine and La Jarretièrre), and his sly references to 
his other novels (e.g. the reference to GR on p. 112) surely invite us to 
situate the new novel in the context of his previous work. Knowing this 
earlier work helps us to make sense of AtD, and reading AtD helps us to see 
new nuances in the earlier work.

You pointed out the gables and the imbrication in the passage above as 
recurring Pynchon figures. What struck me most in the passage was the 
description of Constance as seen from behind, or almost behind: "a 
three-quarters view from behind, showing the face only just crescent." We 
don't see a face, "only this dorsal finality." This reminded me very much of 
some of the descriptions of Katje from GR. As Slothrop first enters her 
hotel room, he sees her standing by the window (after having serenaded her):

"the moonlight only whitens her back, and there is still a dark side, her 
ventral side, her face, that he can no longer see, a terrible beastlike 
change coming over muzzle and lower jaw, black pupils growing to cover the 
entire eye space till whites are gone and there's only the red animal 
reflection when the light comes to strike _no telling when the light_--" 
(GR, 196)

And later, after they've made love (or, more properly: fucked) once again, 
we get this:

"He lies on top of her, sweating, taking great breaths, watching her face 
turned three-quarters away, not even a profile, but the terrible Face That 
Is No Face, gone too abstract, unreachable: the notch of eye socket, but 
never the labile eye, only the anonymous curve of cheek, convexity of mouth, 
a noseless mask of the Other Order of Being, of Katje's being - the lifeless 
nonface that is the only face of hers he really knows, or will ever 
remember." (GR, 222)

That recurring three-quarters view seems to hold some special significance 
for Pynchon. Surely the descriptions of Katje are a bit more sinister than 
the description of Constance Penhallow, but the dorsal view is practically 
the same. In addition to Katje, the description of Constance also reminds me 
of the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, who made a series of beautiful 
paintings around the year 1900 from a perspective very much like the one 
described by Pynchon. I'm not saying that Hammershøi has necessarily been an 
influence on Pynchon, but the description of Hunter's painting of his mother 
recalls some of Hammershøi's paintings. See e.g.:

http://www.kid.dk/VarkBillede.asp?objectid=9919

http://hjem.get2net.dk/silseth_jan/HAMMERSHOI/interior_med_ung_kvinde_set_fra_.htm

http://hjem.get2net.dk/silseth_jan/HAMMERSHOI/interior_med_siddende_kvinde.htm

and this (scroll down to the last painting):

http://www.bridgeman.co.uk/search/s_results.asp?name=&passwd=&search=hammershoi&page=&order=0&view=2&stype=all

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