ATDTDA (21): He sees her point, 577-580

[Michael Mr Haney Bailey]

Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2007 13:43:34 -0800From: markekohut at yahoo.comSubject: Re: ATDTDA (21): He sees her point, 577-580To: isread at btinternet.comCC: pynchon-l at waste.org




Paul's focus leads me to call this section:
 
Portrait of the Artist Defining Himself. 
 
Partial parsing. The artist, this artist Hunter, is committed
to capturing lost vibrational impulses of the soul....to reimagine a 
(perhaps shared) dream...[are we meant to think of Jungian archetypes?,
our lost common humanity, a collective unconscious?].......
Be one on whom nothing is lost, wrote one real artist...Hunter echoes
that......
 
Artists should be rooted (otherwise they are just tourists..and we do know what
TRP thinks of tourists from V., at least)....
 
Artists must be rooted----perhaps like real folk should be?
 
Now the question about almost any writer who does a portrait of the artist:
How much is Hunter like TRP?
 
Mark
----- Original Message ----From: Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com>To: pynchon-l at waste.orgSent: Thursday, November 8, 2007 12:21:32 AMSubject: ATDTDA (21): He sees her point, 577-580As Dally's relationship with Hunter develops he begins with the dreamed war;later, there is another reference linking him to Merle (579). On eachoccasion the painter is telling a story; Dally, model and agent, becomes theaudience. Introspectively, she wonders about the questions he isn'taddressing, not least what his plans are.The dream with which Hunter starts 'places' him in London, erasing his partin earlier sections of the novel; subsequently, one might ask if it isindeed his 'own' dream, just as, in the previous section, his "young, almostadolescent face" is juxtaposed to "gray, nearly white [hair]" (576). Then,having name-dropped WG Grace (577), he goes on to mention "eminent ghosts,Turner and Whistler, Ruskin, Browning sorts of chap" (578, the associationwith predecessor artists perhaps more obvious than the inclusion in thatlist of the poet).Such ghosts are not mere tourists, "their purpose to infest the Venetiansummer, ... to pass quickly as they must, driven off, forgotten" (568).History is defined as "bourgeois literalism, ... its ultimate embodiment,the tourist" (579). Ghosts have left something behind, "subtle vibrationalimpulses of the soul" (578). Hence, "dreamers [can] pick up traces of thedreams of whoever slept there just before them": is the Grace dream, then,something Hunter has "pick[ed] up"? Either way, the dreamer connects, andthis process echoes Hunter's methodology as a painter: "Imagine that insidethis labyrinth ..." etc (575). The tourist (their obsession a mark of"bourgeois literalism", 579) wants the same as all other tourists (eg, the"better-known landmarks around town", 574); whereas the painter looks for(and expects his audience to look for) something else (eg, "... stay in thistown awhile, keep your senses open, reject nothing ..." etc, 579).As the audience for Hunter's exposition, Dally is threatened with the roleof tourist: "She was trying to keep up, but Hunter didn't make it easy."Throughout, she has had little to say, a passive recipient of his speech,called upon to do little but prompt him, eg: "To the spirit behind it-"Eventually, his story of Jesus recalls Merle, whose discourse replaces thatof Hunter ("... as Merle had told it"). This is what, finally, allows her toassert herself ("... it had always seemed to Dally", 580). The section endswith her lengthy speech, followed by a brief coda from Hunter.
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