Jeshimon

[Daniel Harper]

On 5/2/07, Joseph T <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
>
> There is also a kind of pentecost with Reef enjoying talking with his
> Father, adopting his mission and exploding dynamite, "each explosion
> like the text of another sermon, preached in the voice of thunder".



The Jeshimon section is one of my favorite bits of the book, and this
particular image might be my favorite single image in the novel. Let me
quote from page 214:

It might've been the lack of sleep, the sheer relief of getting clear of
> Jeshimon, but Reef began to feel some new prescence inside him, growing,
> inflating -- gravid with it seemed he must become, he found excuses to leave
> the trail now and then and set off a stick or two from the case of dynamite
> he had stolen from the stone powder-house at some mine. Each explosion was
> like the text of another sermon, preached in the voice of thunder by some
> faceless but unrelenting desert prophesier who was coming more and more to
> ride herd on his thoughts.


Even though Pynchon describes the scene differently, when looking back I
always imagine Reef walking down an endless dusty road, pack on his back,
walking purposefully away from the setting sun, throwing sticks of dynamite
every-so-often. Perhaps that's just my own interpretation of the meaning of
the sequence in different visual language. <shrug>

In general, the whole Jeshimon sequence is one of the most metafictional
sequences I can recall offhand. The storyline of a son coming to a violent
town run by a murderous demonic thug to steal back the body of his father,
killed unjustly by men who may or may not be agents of that same demonic
thug, could very easily fill an entire novel. And a good one, at that --
imagine the metaphors and machinations that might have been required to
accomplish this task in another novel. Pynchon sets up the Governor of
Jeshimon like a primary villain, giving him lots of breathing room...

...and then the whole thing's done in eight pages or so. To me this was an
amazing bit, showing off the density of Pynchon's inspirations and ambitions
for the novel, and at the same time indicative of the scope he's trying for:
what might have taken two or three hundred pages in another novel is done in
less than ten, giving these characters and events another
thousand-pages-plus to be explored. It helps to create this enormously
expansive world, and puts the whole Western genre in its place -- as only
one element of a very large and complex world around this time.

God I love ATD. I may go back and do it again before tacking Gravity's
Rainbow.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20070503/7b941576/attachment.html>