Zoyd [IV spoiler]

[alice wellintown]

Blast from the Past.

>From Holton:

There is a clear moral and historical imperative governing
Pynchon's representation of "real" historical events and their
apparent pattern.  It  can be detected perhaps in the way the Bondel's
post-revolutionary song (a failed revolution) echoes in V. through
decades and across
cultures: in Porcepic's appropriation of African polyrhythms for white
European modernist music (V., p. 402) and in Sphere's black American
jazz with its  "rising rhythms of African nationalism" (V., p. 60). (336)

Here Holton continues, " While a number of patterns do
repeat in the historical and  contemporary chapters, it is an
overstatement to claim as
Hite does that reality in V. is somehow 'static...which
suggests that past and present exist simultaneously or even
that they are reversable....in V. past and present reflect
each other in receding vistas. There can be no question, for
example, of reversing the genocidal atrocities carried out
against the Hereros, and to suggest an equivalent to 'Mafia
Winsome's intellectual racism' is clearly as
disproportionate as is here equivalence  of Fopple's siege
party (with its racist torture, murder, rape, and depravity)
and the relatively mild bohemianism of the Whole Sick Crew.
This response to the novel is quite common, however, and
results from approaching it as an abstract philosophical
statement or an epistemological puzzle (albeit a puzzle that
may not allow the possibility of a solution) to the
exclusion of the concrete social and historical detail.

Holten begins his essay by noting this blind spot in
Plater's *Grim Pheonix*

Holton's essay, have not read the book, only the essay, has
a few errors, minor, but
since he notes the national origins of the characters to
support his thesis, this should be corrected. Fergus is
Irish, Armenian, and  Jewish, not Irish American Jewish, and
Benny is Jewish on his mother's side and Italian- Roman
Catholic on his father's side, not Irish and Jewish as
Holton states in his essay.


The recurrence of mirror imagery in discussions of V. is
symptomatic of a prevalent problem in postmodernism: the possibility that an
acceptance of relativity entails a trivializing of interpretation.  (336)

A dangerous tendency of cultural relativism, Fabian adds, is
the fact "that such mirrors, of placed at propitious angles, also have the
miraculous power to make real objects disappear." (336, citing Fabian, Time
and the Other, pp. 44-5]