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

[Jasper]

I'm trying to get an accounting of this mirroring / doubling / duality 
theme.  We seem to have these aspects (facets?):

Reality as a representation of itself ala (insert dead French philosopher)
Copies of copies (the dustjacket)
Geography as a map of itself
Reality once or twice removed
Reality vs. fiction (vs. history?)
Aerial Surveillance, the all-seeing eye
AtD itself a doubling of the world
AtD itself a mirror to Pynchon's previous work
Portals to other dimensions
Scrying -- use of mirrors to gather information or receive information 
from another realm
Use of mirrors to see the future
Use of mirrors to see what has been intentionally hidden
The present vs. the future
The kitchen sink

I guess what I'm trying to get out of this is a sense of the larger 
theme involved; what purpose does all the mirroring and doubling serve, 
what's the point of it all?  For the sake of comparison (and this is 
just offhand) consider, yes, *Lolita*:

In *Lolita*, Humbert Humbert is surrounded by mirrors -- chess, tennis, 
his own name, his book "confession" -- the most significant of which is 
memory.  It is HH's memory of Annabel, and the poisoning obsession of 
it, that drives his lust for Lolita (which is mirrored by love).  Memory 
imprisons HH in the pattern of his behavior.  He is a character trapped 
in time and by his own sense of time.  For VN, mirrors, doubles, 
represent the quandary of solipsism, and the goal of his characters -- 
or the product of their transformative growth -- is to break out 
(butterfly from its chrysalis), to escape time through creative or 
imaginative action, and to thereby achieve self-awareness (and to 
ultimately escape time into "God" or salvation).

I realize I probably shouldn't expect to find anything quite so concise 
in Pynchon, but the abundance of mirror references makes it difficult 
not to search.


>
>              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.
>
>