TMoP - Chapter Two - The cemetery

[Mark Kohut]

I am going to accent how, from the first chapter, Coetzee has made us feel
the world of Petersburg we know from D......

--- On Wed, 9/24/08, Richard Ryan <richardryannyc at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: Richard Ryan <richardryannyc at yahoo.com>
> Subject: TMoP - Chapter Two - The cemetery
> To: "Pynchon-L" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Wednesday, September 24, 2008, 10:40 PM
> "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.
>