TMoP - Chapter Two - The cemetery

[Bekah]

I thought I looked and looked and could find no evidence of a  
cemetery ever having been on Yelagin Island.   Anyone else?

Bekah

On Sep 24, 2008, at 7:40 PM, Richard Ryan wrote:

> "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.
>
>