ATDTDA (5.3) - Word Power

[Tore Rye Andersen]

John:

>There's a lot in these sections to remind us of the power of words, names, 
>repetition, and meaning. Some of this is in the little details, eg. the 
>repeated use of a word such as ice, ice, ice on page 126, or green, green, 
>green on p127. Or the fact that only one vast glacier has yet to be named, 
>and we no doubt recall the passage about the Chums and the islands which 
>once were named but now are fading back into obscurity.

"You guys, you're like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, 
words. [...] The words, who cares? They're rote noises to hold line bashes 
with, to get past the bone barriers around an actor's memory, right?" (Lot 
49, 79)

"North is death's region. There may be no gods, but there is a pattern: 
names by themselves may have no magic, but the _act_ of naming, the physical 
utterance, obeys the pattern." (GR, 322)

"The boy and girl go on battling with their voices -- and Tchitcherine 
understands, abruptly, that soon someone will come out and begin to write 
some of these down in the New Turkic Alphabet he helped frame ... and this 
is how they will be lost." (GR, 357)

You're absolutely right that this old theme of Pynchon's seems particularly 
important in this section. The act of naming may carry some magic, but in 
Pynchon's novels that magic is often malignant, taming as it does the last 
vestiges of wilderness, openness, and terror ("We cannot abide that 
_openness_: it is terror to us" (GR, 264)).

That unnamed glacier you point to -

"a far-spreading glacier, the only one in this entire domain of ice that had 
never been named, as if in fearful acknowledgment of its ancient nobility, 
its seemingly conscious pursuit of a project...." (129)

- recalls the creature described by Captain Padzhitnoff on p. 124:

"In part of Russia where I grew up [...] all animals, no matter how large or 
dangerous, had names -- bears, wolves, Siberian tigers .... All except for 
one. One creature that other animals, including humans, were afraid of, 
because if it found them it would eat them, without necessarily killing them 
first. It appreciated pain. Pain was like ... salt. Spices. That creature, 
we did not have name for. Ever. Do you understand?"

- and both recall the horrible creature brought home by the Vormance 
expedition, even more horrible for being unnamed, of course. In fact, this 
creature - which speaks in either the hisses of a serpent (Harry Potter's 
Parseltongue, anyone?), or "languages long dead to the world" (145) - is 
described (but significantly not named) in terms very much like that unnamed 
glacier: "But who could have foreseen that the far-fallen object would prove 
to harbor not merely a consciousness but an ancient purpose as well, and a 
plan for carrying it out?" (149) - sounds very much like that description of 
the glacier with its "ancient nobility, its seemingly conscious pursuit of a 
project....", doesn't it? They must surely be connected in some deep and 
terrible way, beyond words....

As Kit runs into Fleetwood Vibe much later in the novel, BTW, Padzhitnoff's 
unnamed creature turns up again, at least in conversation: Fleetwood speaks 
to Kit of sensing secret cities deep in the taiga:

"dense with industry, unsleeping, dedicated to designs no one speaks of 
aloud, as one hesitates to speak the name of the wilderness Creature that 
feeds on all other creatures...." (790)

This refusal to name the wilderness Creature is no so much motivated by 
"ritual reluctance" (Lot 49, 71), as by sheer blind terror at what the name 
would evoke. Unlike Tristero, that Creature, as the unnamed glacier, come 
from an ancient time *before* language, and the characters are afraid of 
summoning their terrible wrath upon themselves, should they dare to name 
them. The ironic thing is, of course, that if they actually went ahead and 
named that wilderness Creature/glacier/odalisque of the snows, they would 
have taken the first step towards taming them, detracting from their 
sublimity (Edmund Burke's notion of the Sublime, which speaks of the awe and 
horror caused by dark and uncertain forces beyond language, seems 
particularly apt here).

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