ATDTDA (21)// ignore previous, it's blank

[Michael Mr Haney Bailey]

The art things, I forget if there is a color tab for that, are 
overwhelmingly present in this chapter.
 
More so than in any chapter since the last time HP appeared lengthily
(omitting the NY getaway, I guess) -- 
if characters to some degree embody ideas,
then HP -> art
FV -> capitalism('s excesses)   WT-> militant labor, or "revolution"
CL-> espionage/secrecy
 
but enough of that, I have a different, possibly equally staggeringly
obvious observation that's been percolating on a back burner,
 
having to do with the subjective experience of art as described by
the painter guy (I keep wanting to call him Falco...), and 
how it falls in nicely with D&G machines: something that is an intensely
felt metaphor - "Kafka's writing machine" not meaning his typewriter exactly,
but something that exists in the realm of ideas
 
which is perceptible to the human mind/sensorium -- as is art
and the making of somebody feel/perceive something, which is the
power that the warmongers strive for with their machines of
metal and steel, but vainly because all they can do is destroy...
 
but within ATD the valuation if expressed in word count, is, I think,
greater for the artistic nemesis...
 
or maybe not - comparing the length
of Umeki's and Kit's talking about the q-"weapon" versus the conversations
around "Falco's" artistry of Hell...
 
and yet U&K after talking about the physical machine end up parting, breaking up,
losing each other in the shuffle
 
whereas Dally and "Falco" and HP kind of all become closer and create
more community....as/while/after/as a result of? talking about an
artistic, very D&G type of machine
 
there's one really ambiguous phrase about HP "adding something to his
adventures" that I need to reread and look at Paul's glosses again, because
I wasn't sure if Dally and HP did sleep together...


markekohut:




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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