ATDTDA (20): As if her breath, her yearning, 568-569

[Page]

It may be worth noting that Charles Taylor is known for his works on Hegel, the arch idealist. Nothing exists but ideas; the "real" world is not physical, as we mistakenly believe. McTaggart does to time what Hegel did to the physical world, and both are reacting to Kant.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Mark Kohut 
  To: pynchon -l ; me 
  Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2007 4:44 AM
  Subject: Re: ATDTDA (20): As if her breath, her yearning, 568-569


  Yes, Paul this shows, in your recreation, a key theme thread, I think: Venice is, metaphorically, Shambala-like, and Dally is, of course, a tourist....not of it, always
  alienated trying to fit in.....

  Just about anyplace 'older than memory" is part ofTRPs redemptive vision, I suggest
  and if Dally is or was an innocent, this is worked out.

  "magic' works again near this place (and used to work in it, although magic may have been driven out).

  In a notice on a new book by the philosopher Charles Taylor about the West's cultural/philosophical history, he says that when the West had a unified worldview---later
  Middle ages when science and faith were one, so to speak---magic was "all around" tghe people thought.

  Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com> wrote:
    Dally arrives in Venice, and Ch40 begins with another reference to the
    Chicago Fair, now "a long time ago". One thinks of her return to Chicago,
    "stunned by the immensity, the conglomeration of architectural styles (336).
    And then, her first impression of New York ("at last", 337). In Venice, as
    in New York and Chicago, the experience is powerful; and now, she is
    "certain for the first time in a life on the roll that whatever 'home' had
    meant, this [is] older than memory, than the story she thought she knew"
    (568). The voice of the tourist is intrusive, quite apart from the
    sentiments expressed: she must both relate to spoken English and be
    alienated from a version ("vilely mucous") that signifies difference.

    Here, "the evening ... would see to this pest and his replicas in their
    thousands ..." etc. Cf. the tourists who populate Ch38, as the cause of
    Randolph's "melancholy" on 549, or the "[y]oung tourists ... winding up
    their season of exemption from care" on 552.

    From Dally the narrative moves on to the Zombinis collectively, and their
    successful tour; from here, Dally isn't mentioned for several pages,
    somewhat similar to the Kit has been treated in the text. Dally, of course,
    isn't a Zombini, so Vincenzo Miserere's comment ("I think once there were
    Zombinis around Venice", 569) necessarily alienates her as the British
    Accent did. It seems that "Bria ha[s] known about the Venetian Zombinis
    since childhood", emphasising Dally's exclusion from the family: This
    comment, beginning a new paragraph allows Bria to assert herself, for once
    independently of her half-sister.





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