NP: Sumthin different: The tower [metaphor] is everywhere; P.S.

[Mark Kohut]

Better: the tower is nowhere in Child of God. 

--- On Fri, 12/11/09, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> Subject: NP: Sumthin different: The tower [metaphor] is everywhere
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Friday, December 11, 2009, 10:20 AM
> 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.  
> 
> 
>       
>