CoL49 (6) The Historical Wharfinger

[Dave Monroe]

   "'I would like to find out,' she presently plunged, 'something
about the historical Wharfinger. Not so much the verbal one.'
   "'The historical Shakespeare,' growled one of the grad students
through a full beard, uncapping another bottle. 'The historical Marx.
The historical Jesus.'
   "'He's right,' shrugged Bortz, 'they're dead. What's left?' 'Words.'
   "'Pick some words,' said Bortz. 'Them, we can talk about.'
   "'"No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow,"'" quoted Oedipa,
'"Who's once been set his tryst with Trystero." Courier's Tragedy, Act
IV, Scene 8.'" (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p.


"the historical Wharfinger"

>From T.S. Eliot, Essays on Elizabethan Drama (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and World, 1956 [1932]), "Cyril Tourneur," pp. 110-24 ...

None of the Elizabethan dramatists is more puzzling; none offers less
foothold for the scholarly investigator; and none is more dangerous
for the literary critic.  We know almost nothing of his life; we trace
his hand in no collaboration....  Yet in no plays by any minor
Elizabethan is a more positive personality revelaed than in The
Revenger's Tragedy. No Elizabethan dramatist offers greater
temptation: to the scholar, to hazard conjecture of fact; and to the
critic, to hazard conjecture of significance.... it is no disrespect
to ... scholarship and diligence to remark how little ... has been
added to our knowledge of the singular poet with the delightful
name.... all that later students have been able to do is to piece
together several probable shreds....  And with all plausible guesses
possible ... Tourneur's 'whole early life is a complete blank.'" (pp.
110-1)

[cf. not only "the historical Wharfinger," but the historical Pynchon as well]

"It [The Revenger's Tragedy] does express--and this, chiefly, is what
gives it its amazing unity--an intense and unique and horrible vision
of life.... The cynicism, the loathing and disgust of humanity,
expressed consummately in The Revenger's Tragedy, are immature in the
respect that they exceed the object. Their objective equivalents are
characters practising the grossest vices; characters which seem merely
to be spectres projected from the poet's inner world of nightmare,
some horror beyond words.... its motive is truly the death motive, for
it is the loathing and horror of  life itself.  To have realized this
motive so well is a triumph; for the hatred of life is an important
phase--even, if you like, a mystical experience--in life itself."
(pp.199-20)

http://www.archive.org/stream/tseliotessaysone000809mbp/tseliotessaysone000809mbp_djvu.txt

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=59129


"No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow"

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0108&msg=59014

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0905&msg=135588