ATDTDA (5.2) - Constance Penhallow

[John BAILEY]

M&D features a bunch of names connected with light, shadow and related things. AtD seems to further this.

I love love love the B(lack)asnight possibility. Even if P didn't intend it, having the name make sense by reinserting a "missing" LACK is just too much fun.

Penhallow made me think of a penumbra, but the pen-prefix not referring to the umbra (darkest part of a shadow) but to the hallow (halo?), light associated with holiness also possessing a point where it overlaps with its opposite. Again, maybe a long bow.

I'm sure there are other light/shade names in AtD. 

I was listening to Bjork's song "Hunter" yesterday and thought huh, she's from Iceland too.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Carvill John
Sent: Tuesday, 20 March 2007 8:14 PM
To: bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net; richard.romeo at gmail.com; torerye at hotmail.com
Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: ATDTDA (5.2) - Constance Penhallow

[Again I must begin with an apology. This post is a touch disjointed. I had intended to shake it into some coherent order last night, but my son wasn't in the mood for settling so...]

Part Two of the book, 'Iceland Spar', begins on page 121, but the passages featuring the Chums failing to catch the Etienne-Louis Malus could be looked on as a kind of a prologue, and I'd suggest that the Iceland Spar section proper begins on page 126. Fittingly, Pynchon starts this off by giving us one of his atypically explicit bursts of exposition. Instead of relying on us to go off and look up Parisian ray-fancier Etienne-Louis Malus, he spells it all out for us - Iceland Spar, polarised light, so forth. So is that significant? Why does Pynchon make this explicit? To point out the importance of that curious calcite, of light, and even photography?

Well, I haven't read nearly enough of the ATDTDA posts so far, but even I know there's been a thread on photography, mainly focusing on what Pynchon's attitude to that particular blend of science and art might be. I'm guessing he's ambivalent, as he is about many technologies. There's little doubt of course that he 'unambiguously' dislikes having his photo taken, but that doesn't preclude him taking an interest in the art - or technologies - of photography in general, just so long as you don't aim them directly at him.

And there's a lot of photography in ATD, what with Merle and all, and photography is one of many ways into one of those nodal points where a load of thematic strands come together in a thick little knot. Where would you even start with trying to untangle it?

Leaving aside the personal Pynchon aspects, there are links from photography to sliver halide, to silver mining, to dynamite, and thus to capitalism and anarchy. In another direction, connections run through light to electricity to religion, aether, mathematics, etc. Then there's the nexus of photography, alchemy, and chemistry, and explosives.

And of course the recent technologies of railroads and rail travel widely credited at the time with having altered - and even 'annihilated' time and space, and a lot of the book's thematic elements revolve around these matters.  So as well as photography's links to light, you can add time and spacec as well.

And if Pynchon is in fact flagging the significance of all this stuff about light and time and so on here, I'd say it's worth noting that he mentions polarised light, which makes me think of polarising filters in photography, of rays, refraction, birefringence, and angles of 90 degrees.

While we're about it, lets just mention that as far as I'm aware, none of the reviews - at least in the mainstream press - mentioned that 'Against the Day' is a translation of photographic term 'Contra Jour', which can also be translated as 'Against the Light'.  Kind of a major significance to omit, no? And they would have known about it if they'd been reading the posts on the p-list. I'm ashamed to admit I can't remember which p-lister it was who pointed the 'contra jour' thing out but all credit to him.

Ok, so photography is a blend of technology and art, and once you've mastered the technical aspects of photography - and I personally definitely have not - then you get on to the really tough part, the art, and an important aspect of that is the framing. And here, in one of my favourite passages of the whole book, we hear a little about framing:

"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..."

In my initial reading of ATD, while I hugely enjoyed the first part, 'The Light Over the Ranges', and in fact reckon that part alone could stand as a rebuke to all the short-sighted negative reviews, I did wonder about the lightness of tone, and thought there was a certain Pynchon quality missing (there wasn't, but I only realised that later), which if pushed I'd have described as 'strangeness'. But when I got to the initial Iceland Spar sections I felt that strangeness was restored, as the narrative begins to thicken and the style gets more dense and allusive. And you probably couldn't get a better example of that than the Constance Penhallow paragraph.

You could spend a lot of time pondering this paragraph, or just re-reading it to enjoy the poetry and rhythms of the prose. Even the little details, like the repetition of the word 'as' - 'as if', 'as through dust', 'as with rain', 'as to sunset'.....

What got me, though, was the sense that this could have been lifted right out of Gravity's Rainbow, and I started wondering about some of the themes, and some of the words. 'Gabling' was one, there seems to be a lot of architecture in ATD, especially the tops of buildings, and I started poking around in other Pynchon books, looking for gabling. Didn't find any. But, I had more luck with 'gables', as in this passage from GR:

"Like signals set out for lost travelers, shapes keep repeating for him, Zonal shapes he will allow to enter but won't interpret, not any more. Just as well, probably. The most persistent of these, which seem to show up at the least real times of day, are the stairstep gables that front so many of these ancient north-German buildings, rising, backlit, a strangely wet gray as if risen out of the sea, over these straight and very low horizons. They hold shape, they endure, like monuments to Analysis. Three hundred years ago mathematicians were learning to break the cannonball's rise and fall into stairsteps of range and height, Ax and Ay, allowing them to grow smaller and smaller, approaching zero as armies of eternally shrinking midgets galloped upstairs and down again, the patter of their diminishing feet growing finer, smoothing out into continuous sound. This analytic legacy has been handed down intact-it brought the technicians at Peenemünde to peer at the Askania films of Rocket flights, frame by frame, Ax by Ay, flightless themselves . . 
. film and calculus, both pornographies of flight. Reminders of impotence and abstraction, the stone Treppengiebel shapes, whole and shattered, appear now over the green plains, and last a while, and go away: in their shadows children with hair like hay are playing Himmel and Hölle, jumping village pavements from heaven to hell to heaven by increments, sometimes letting Slothrop have a turn, sometimes vanishing back into their dark gassen where elder houses, many-windowed and sorrowing, bow perpetually to the neighbor across the way, nearly touching overhead, only a thin lead of milk sky between."

So not just gables, but 'a strangely wet gray', which seems to fit with the "gray slatework, shining as with rain". Then of course there's all the stuff about patterns and repeating shapes, meanings and interpretations, monuments to analysis.

And the phrase that really kept ringing in my head was 'lizard imbrication'. 
Leave aside the fact that in this case 'imbrication' is an example of a word being used to describe the very thing that represents its etymological origin - roof tiles - it just seems such a resonant phrase. In any case, as the man said, "words are only an eye-twitch away from the things they stand for."

So I went looking for 'imbrication', and found this, in Mason & Dixon - apologies for the long quotation:

"I looked up. He was undeniably there,-I had not been upon the island long enough for Rapture of the North to have set in. For a moment I thought 'twas Stig, a Shadow of Stig, you recollect our mystickal Axman, with his Nostalgia for the North, so in command of him. Yet my Visitor's eyes were too strange even for Stig,-his aspect, his speech, were nothing I recogniz'd. We descended to the Shore, and went out upon a great Floe of Ice, and so one Floe to another, until all had frozen into a continuous Plain. In his movement he seem'd as much a Visitor as I in this Country. 
>From his Pack he unfolded a small Sledge of Caribou Hide, stretch'd upon an ingeniously hinged framework of Whalebone, and from a curious black Case produced a Device of elaborately coil'd Wires, set upon Gimbals, which he affix'd to the Prow of the vehicle. 'Hurry!' I had barely climb'd aboard when the whole concern spun about, till pointing, as a Needle-man I surmis'd, to the North Magnetick Pole, and began to move, faster and ever faster, with a rising Whine, over the Ice-Prairie. 'Sir,' I would have shouted, had the swiftness of our Travel allowed me breath, 'Sir, not so far!' when I'd really meant to say, 'not so fast.' We sped thus northward in perpetual sunlight. Night would not come to that Lati tude. The Sun up there, from mid-May to late July, does not set. The phantoms, the horrors, when they came, would not be those of Night.

"Nor, as things turn'd out, would it be a Journey to the North Pole. The Pole itself, to be nice, hung beyond us in empty space,-for as I was soon to observe, at the top of the World, somewhere between eighty and ninety degrees North, the Earth's Surface, all 'round the Parallel, began to curve sharply inward, leaving a great circum-polar Emptiness," as Mason shifts uncomfortably and looks about for something to smoke or eat, "directly toward which our path was taking us, at first gently, then with some insistence, down-hill, ever downward, and thus, gradually, around the great Curve of its Rim.- And 'twas so that we enter'd, by its great northern Portal, upon the inner Surface of the Earth." A patiently challenging smile.

Mason sits rhythmickally inserting into his Face an assortment of Meg Bland's Cookies, Tarts, and Muffins,.. .pretending to be silent by choice, lest any phrase emerge too farinaceously inflected.

Dixon continues cheerfully.- "The Ice giving way to Tundra, we proceeded, ever downhill, into a not-quite-total darkness, the pressure of the Air slowly increasing, each sound soon taking on a whispering after-tone, as from a sort of immense compos ite Echo,-until we were well inside, hundreds of miles below the Outer Surface, having clung to what we now walked upon quite handily all the way, excepting that we arriv'd upside-down as bats in a belfry...."

The Interior had remain'd less studied philosophickally, than endur'd anxiously, by those who might choose to travel Diametrickally across it,- means of Flight having been develop'd early in the History of the Inner Sur face. "Their God, like that of the Iroquois, lives at their Horizon,-here 'tis their North or South Horizon, each a more and less dim Ellipse of Sky-light. The Curve of the Rim is illuminated, depending on the position of the Sun, in greater or lesser Relievo,-chains of mountains, thin strokes of towers, the eternally spilling lives of thousands dwelling in the long Estuarial Towns wrapping from Outside to Inside as the water rushes away in uncom monly long waterfalls, downward for hours, unbrak'd, till at last debouching into an interior Lake of great size, upside-down but perfectly secured to its Lake-bed by Gravity as well as Centrifugal Force, and in which upside-down swimmers glide at perfect ease, hanging over an Abyss thousands of miles deep. From wherever one is, to raise one's Eyes is to see the land and Water rise ahead of one and behind as well, higher and higher till lost in the Thickening of the Atmosphere.... In the larger sense, then, to journey any where, in this Terra Concava, is ever to ascend. With its Corollary,-Out side, here upon the Convexity,-to go anywhere is ever to descend."

With great Cordiality and respect upon all sides, Dixon was taken to the local Academy of Sciences, and introduc'd to the Fellows.

"Nothing to do with your actual Appearance," Dixon said, "but all of thee have such a familiar look,-up above, we hear many Tales of Gnomes, Elves, smaller folk, who live underground and possess what are, to huz, magickal Powers? Who've min'd their ways to the borders of our world, following streams, spying upon us from the Fells when the light of the Day's tricky enough. Is this where they come from, then?"

"They are we." One of the inner-surface Philosophers removing his Hat and sweeping into a Bow, the others, in Echelon, following identic-kally, Hat-Brims all ending up in a single, perfectly imbricated Line.

"Your servant, Sirs."

"You receive Messages from us, by way of your Magnetic Compasses. What you call the 'Secular Change of Declination' is whatever dimm'd and muffl'd remnant may reach you above, of all the lives of us Below,-being less liv'd than waged, at a level of Passion that would seem, to you, quite intense. We have learn'd to use the Tellurick Forces, including that of Magnetism,-which you oddly seem to consider the only one."

"There are others?" Mason perking up.

"That's what he said. All most effective and what we'd style 'miracu lous,' 
down there,-tho' perhaps not as much so, up here.


---- Ok, not much in that 'imbricated', connection-wise, I admit, but look at all the resonances in the passage which looking for 'imbrication' took me to - the tundra, the polar exploration,  the hollow earth (that telluric interior), the magnetism, the Visitors, the axman form the North, etc. But also, right at the beginning, the 'Rapture of the North', which is a phrase Fleetwood Vibe will use in just a few pages.

What really surprised me about all this is that for once I was wrong when I assumed, on first reading Fleetwood Vibe's opening words - "It wasn't any Rapture of the North..." - that the capitalised phrase Rapture of the North was a well-known one and only my own ignorance kept me from getting the reference. But I could find nothing about it in books or on Google, and had given up hope and pretty much forgotten about it, until I serendipitously found it in that M&D 'imbrication' passage.

Just for completion's sake, lets also note here that the Pynchon wiki reminds us there's a mention much later in the book, of a 'Rapture of the Sands'.


What does this all add up to? You're asking me? Well, I suppose I could boil this down a few basic questions, for pondering and discussion:

- Anyone care to venture an attempt to shed some light on the 'meaning' of that peculiar paragraph?

- What does it tell us about the interconnections between ATD and Pynchon's other books?

- Do we think Pynchon intends us to go looking for, and find, these connections?

- What does it all add up to in terms of considering Pynchon's novels as one big interconnected work? And does this link in with the circularity - already noticed by one unusually astute p-lister (you know who you are) - in the time periods covered from  'V.' through to 'Against the Day'?  Full fuckin' circle indeed.


One final note - an earlier mention of 'rapture' in Mason & Dixon:

"Others told of Rapture by creatures not precisely Angels, nor yet Demons,-styl'd 'Agents of Altitude.'"

Agents of Altitude eh? Balloon-boy rapture, for sure.....

_________________________________________________________________
Watch free concerts with Pink, Rod Stewart, Oasis and more. Visit MSN Presents today. 
http://music.msn.com/presents?icid=ncmsnpresentstagline&ocid=T002MSN03A07001


The information contained in this e-mail message and any accompanying files is or may be confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, any use, dissemination, reliance, forwarding, printing or copying of this e-mail or any attached files is unauthorised. This e-mail is subject to copyright. No part of it should be reproduced, adapted or communicated without the written consent of the copyright owner. If you have received this e-mail in error please advise the sender immediately by return e-mail or telephone and delete all copies. Fairfax does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of any information contained in this e-mail or attached files. Internet communications are not secure, therefore Fairfax does not accept legal responsibility for the contents of this message or attached files.