NP: Sumthin different: The tower [metaphor] is everywhere

Mark Kohut markekohut at yahoo.com
Fri Dec 11 09:20:07 CST 2009


I have been taken since the last intense plist reading of C of Lot 49, with the 'tower' notion in its allusive depth. In Eliade (and others, I'm sure), the high point of any traditional society's community, village, usually a symbol for the spiritual (or simply fecund) nature of the land----see Goldman's "The Spire"; see "Three on a Tower" a non-fction work wherein Pound, Eliot and Yeats' modernism is explored, partly with this symbol.

Anyway, in Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, I just read this: "A door somehwere was banging, an eerie sound in the empty wood. Ballard walked up the road. He passed a rusted tin shed and beyond it a wooden tower, He looked up. High up on the tower a door creaked open and clapped shut. Ballard looked around. Sheets of roofing tin clattered and banged and a white dust was blowing off the barren yard by the quarry shed."--p 39, vintage edition.

To call it a wasteland would be a romantic exaggeration, so to speak.  


      



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