AtDTdA: (9) 248 Wednesday's kick-ass question

[kelber at mindspring.com]

This passage from V lays out some of TRP's early musings on the subject of mirrors.  It's from Chapter Two (p. 36 in my crappy Bantam paperback version), where Rachel is in Schoenmaker's waiting room, paying for Esther's nosejob:

"Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45 [degrees], and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse time, coexisting, cancelling one another exactly out.  Were there many such reference points, scattered throughout the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose?"

Some sense of mirrors as portals to another dimension, such as Hunter Penhallow's Iceland-Venice translation [ATD, p. 136.


Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Jasper <jasper.fidget at gmail.com>

>Jasper gasped:
> >Today's kick-ass essay question
> >This chapter has a lot about mirrors and opposites, "landmarks" and 
>"anti-landmarks", the >dualities of Venice itself, etc. Describe how 
>this theme relates to the book as a whole, >and/or to Pynchon's body of 
>work. How many doubles or mirrors come to mind? Contrast >the use of 
>mirrors with the use of glass. How do the two combine or oppose one 
>another?
>
>Ahem!  Mirrors?  Opposites?  Doubles?  Nothing?
>
>Anyone for Lolita then?  All kinds of cool mirrors and doubles in 
>there....  Tennis, chess, butterfly wings, HH....  Yeah, Lolita kicks ass.