TMoP - Chapter Two - The cemetery

Richard Ryan richardryannyc at yahoo.com
Wed Sep 24 21:40:20 CDT 2008


"They take the little ferryboat to Yelagin Island, which he has not
visited for years.  But for the two old women in black, they are the
only passengers.  It is a cold, misty day.  As they approach, a dog,
grey and emaciated, begins to lope up and down the jetty, whining
eagerly.  The ferryman swings a boathook at it; it retreats to a safe
distance.  Isle of dogs, he thinks: are there packs of them skulking
among the trees, waiting for the mourners to leave before they begin
their digging?"

To quote (from memory) William Carlos Williams's introduction to HOWL: "Ladies and gentlemen, we are going through Hell."

By page seven of TMoP, Coetzee has already deployed a set of allusions which will continue to resonate throughout the book: to Dante, to Rilke, and, of course, always and everywhere, to the historical double of the book's fictional protagonist, Dostoevsky. 

The visit to the Land of the Dead in the second chapter - invoking immediately so many classic visits to the Underworld (Orpheus, Odysseus, Aeneas, Leopold Bloom....), and accompanied by all the necessary signs (ferryman, dogs, widows) establishes a re-occuring pattern in the novel: the Living in search of the Dead.

I'd suggest we'll find, as the novel progresses, that TMoP is - among other things, but perhaps pre-eminently - a mediation on Necromancy, on way that the survivors attempt to resurrect the people they've lost.
 

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