ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Joseph T]

This is my second time through this section of the book (3rd for some  
parts) and I think it is both deliberately more elusive,  
fictionalized/mythologized, and non historical than any other section  
with the exception of the central asian sub-sands which feed us in a  
later chapter, or the time travel U. One word has lodged in my mind  
to connect several parts of ATD in particular and make more sense of  
Pynchon in general: that word is unearth.
unearth |ˌənˈərθ| |ˈənˌərθ| |ʌnˌəːθ|
verb [ trans. ]
find (something) in the ground by digging.
• discover (something hidden, lost, or kept secret) by investigation  
or searching : they have done all they can to unearth the truth.

The miners are unearthing  silver and zinc and gold as dynamitic  
firepower  becomes a kind of religion both for the anarchists and the  
mine-owners, vying for ownership of their lives and labors. The  
scientist Tesla is unearthing electromagnetic forces. The Traverses  
are unearthing the ghost of their father. The Vormance expedition are  
variously looking for the perfect iceland spar, a more perfect  
control of global energies, transportation routes, and are drawn  
magnetically  resting place of an unearthly  being hidden beneath the  
ice. Converging on the scene from beneath the surface of the planet  
come the chums of chance. Who have learned nothing from the book of  
Genesis but serve as both God and serpent in this story.

The serpent faced creature. One thinks here of Superman, so much more  
likely in our actual history to be malign than benign, with his  ice  
fortress and power crystals. I also thought of Oppenheimer's thoughts  
from the Baghavad Gita when viewing the first atomic explosion," now  
am I become death destroyer of worlds".
We have unearthed the "radiance of a thousand suns" , and now seem on  
the verge of unearthing the earth.

One also thinks of King Kong found in  a region the Chums have just  
come from, and the Karmic payback represented in Kongs attack on New  
York, the revenge of the god of the colonized  native peoples.  But  
it is northerners who are historically the most violent natives and  
this unearthing of their Fear/god is a storybook foreshadowing, set  
in a frozen white world of green ice and  ribbons of colored light.

I also see throughout ATD, particularly in the minds of the powerful  
a psycho-mythological unearthing of the ancient and seemingly  
hardwired story of a final battle between light and darkness , ( or  
good and evil, or just  survival of the fittest) . A vision which  
seems to change little from Zoroaster to John's apocalypse to the  
wars to end wars, to the evil empire to the religion of Jihad to the  
war on terror) So often the modern justification for war revolves  
around the need to defend oneself from a clearly oppressive and  
aggressive state (the military industrial complex must thank God for  
the Nazis on a regular basis), but it is impossible to find this  
moral clarity with WW1, or today. The Karl Roves and Rush Limbaughs   
of the world  treat people  like moral children who cannot realize  
that the demonic other we fear is a part of ourselves, a potential we  
all share, the monster we dug up and carried home with us for the  
obvious rewards.

The entire story of the Etienne-Louis Malus  is  fictionalized and  
distanced from the more historical world of  the Traverses  and the  
non chums parts of ATD. That distance is hard to bridge unless one  
takes these chums sections as ways of connecting the turn of the last  
century (and the ideas and myths at play then) with the turn of this  
century (and the result of choices made). Right now this makes the  
most sense for me  of the unavoidable comparison between the  
northern  creature's attack and the attacks of 9-11.

Maybe we should stop the roller coaster unearthing and take up a  
little more earthing.




On Mar 21, 2007, at 11:32 AM, robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:

> I was thinking, just the other day, about Love's Body:
>
>                    "Norman O. Brown is variously considered the  
> architect
>                   of a new view of man, a modern-day shaman, and a
>                   Pied Piper leading the youth of America astray. His
>                   more ardent admirers, of whom I am one, judge him
>                   one of the seminal thinkers who profoundly challenge
>                   the dominant assumptions of the age. Although he is
>                   a classicist by training who came late to the  
> study of
>                   Freud and later to mysticism, he has already created
>                   a revolution in psychological theory."
>
>                   --Sam Keen, Psychology Today
>
> http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/2502.html
>
>
> I read the thing many years ago, and remember little in terms of  
> content
> (other than recalling it was pretty freeeeky stuff, man) but absorbing
> instantly the notion of sculpting literary structure out of other  
> peoples words.
> Of course, other writers use this mode, like Studs Terkel, but when  
> I read
> "Love's Body" the quarter dropped and the jukebox started to play.
>
>                   Mark Kohut:
>                   Does anyone think it is Pynchon's way of  
> indicating the
>                   darkness in us, in human nature when it is  
> mangled by
>                   'the day's" narrownesses.....not allowed to be  
> natural?
>
>                   A kind of Return of the Repressed?.....We sorta  
> know that
>                   Brown's Life Against Death was important to TRP...
>                   (see stuff on GR)......so, here the Death Wish  
> shows itself,
>                   buried in a remote location, in ATD?
>
>                   David Casseres:
>                   I can't help thinking of those many different  
> versions
>                   of "The Mummy's Curse," in which a group of  
> scientists,
>                   against the earnest advice of their guides, take an
>                   artifact out of its concealment and ship it home for
>                   their museum. And as soon as they get to New York,
>                   it breaks out of its confinement and causes havoc.
>
>                   David Morris
>                   I agree with your take here. One gets the sense  
> that the
>                   object was buried in a remote location for a  
> reason. The
>                   ultimate "Mummy's Curse" cautionary-ignored tale  
> would
>                   have to be that of Pandora's Box.

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