All Along the Watchtower: Permanance, Power, Mind, Spirit

[Dave Monroe]

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 2:21 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> The tower was an important symbol, for reasons originating in the above, for those modernist poets whom Pynchon loves....

[...]

> Yeats used it in a major poem and had a special cover designed for the book ...

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction
   Issue:   Volume 50, Number 1 / Fall 2008
   Pages:   35 - 50
   URL:   Linking Options
   DOI:   10.3200/CRIT.50.1.35-50

The Sewers, the City, the Tower: Pynchon's V., Fausto's Confessions,
and Yeats's A Vision

David Coughlan

Abstract:

This article examines the connections between Thomas Pynchon's V. and
the work of W. B. Yeats, arguing that it is not only Yeats as poet,
but also Yeats as mage, who interests Pynchon. It shows what part is
played in V. by the concepts developed by Yeats in his works Per Amica
Silentia Lunae and A Vision—the symbol of interlocking gyres, the
twenty-eight phases, the Great Wheel, and the Anima Mundi, or soul of
the world. It argues that in the course of the chapter "Confessions of
Fausto Maijstral," Pynchon uses the destruction of the Maltese city of
Valletta first to both represent and criticize the abstraction of
Yeats's Byzantium and second, through the figure of the child poet, to
recast Yeats's Anima Mundi as a textual realm open to and changing
with the demands and experiences of the present.

http://heldref-publications.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,3,7;journal,3,22;linkingpublicationresults,1:119918,1

> For Oedipa, the way up is the way down [from that tower]!

The Culture of Information
ENGL 25 — Winter 2003, Alan Liu  Notes for Class 10

Rapunzel in Her Tower

Oedipa Maas's life at the beginning of the novel:

Tupperware parties (p. 1) & Kinneret-Among-the-Pines (2)
(history of Tupperware | Tupperware Homepage)
Cf., Mike Nichols's The Graduate (1967)
Cold War world (83)

Pynchon's mythologization of the Tupperware world:

Narcissus myth: "San Narciso," "Echo courts"

Mucho Maas's private myth of the car lot (5, 118)

Oedipa's private myth: Rapunzel in her tower (10-12)

Pynchon's "mediatization" of the Tupperware world: telephone, radio
and music, film and TV, computers, postal system, Muzak. The
"Tupperware" that seals this world in its tower is not ultimately
plastic. It is the very stuff of myth-making in the consumer age:
media.

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What Else?

"If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof
against its magic, what else?" (12)

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Counterculture

One way out of the tower: the "far outs" of the 1960s:

sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll (as parodied by Pynchon)

adultery and the sexual revolution, à la The Graduate (31)

drugs (e.g., LSD)
Oedipa's boozing (e.g., tequila with Metzger)

rock-n-roll (Paranoids)
(cf., The Doors, "Break On Through," 1967)

the Sixties "discovery of poverty" and social otherness

Oedipa's nighttime odyssey through San Francisco, 88 ff.: gay bar
Chinatown  Mexican Americans  African Americans  the alcoholic, old
Sailor): the "disinherited" peoples

cf., Joyce's Nighttown (Circe) episode in Ulysses; Pynchon's Slothrop
in the "Zone" in Gravity's Rainbow

p. 101 ("God knew how many citizens . . .")
p. 103 (Oedipa as Mary in a Pietà scene) (cf., Michaelangelo's Pietà)


"God" & religion, twinned with media (1, 14-15)
"revelation" (31, 64, 71):
Like Sixties counterculture, Oedipa seems ready to join a cult (the
cult of Tristero) that could give her a quasi-religious revelation

Pynchon's Alternative Counterculture and Alternative Revelation:

Pynchon's secularization of the context of in which revelation is
needed. In his diagnosis of contemporary society, Rapunzel's Tower is
created by the dominant institutions of contemporary secular society:

the governmental-military-scientific-industrial complex (e.g., Yoyodyne)

the media and communications industry

all symbolized in the postal system (compare the Arpanet before Milnet
split off)

Therefore Pynchon's vision is of an alternative counterculture: an
"intraculture" inhabiting (rather than "dropping out" of) the
scientific-military-industrial-media-informational complex—i.e.,
seeking revelation within what Pink Floyd called The Machine. For
Pynchon, the really "far out" (bizarre, strange) is in the Machine
itself.

The great question of the novel: What would be a secular and technical
revelation inside, rather than outside, the machine of contemporary
society?

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The Entropy Metaphor

Entropy in a Tupperware Container: A Demo

Second Law of Thermodynamics: in a closed system, disorder increases

"randomness" increases

uniformity increases

"heat death"

Pynchon, "Entropy" (1960):

"Nevertheless," continued Callisto, "he found in entropy, or the
measure of disorganization for a closed system, an adequate metaphor
to apply to certain phenomena in his own world. He saw, for example,
the younger generation responding to Madison Avenue with the same
spleen his own had once reserved for Wall Street, and in American
'consumerism' discovered a similar tendency from the least to the most
probable, from differentiation to sameness, from ordered individuality
to a kind of chaos. He  . . . envisioned a heat-death for his culture
in which ideas, like heat-energy, would no longer be transferred,
since each point in it would ultimately have the same quantity of
energy, and intellectual motion would, accordingly, cease."

Pynchon's metaphor of entropy:
Contemporary culture is a closed system (Rapunzel's tower)

Contemporary culture is therefore entropy heat death (e.g., Mucho's
car lot, 5; the mixed-up film reels of the Baby Igor movie; Mucho as
Muzak-like everyone, 114-15).
The question of a secular and technical "revelation" in the novel thus
becomes: Can heat death be reversed ("negentropy")? Or if not, what
revelation is still possible inside an entropic closed system?

http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ayliu/courses/english25/2003W/materials/class10notes.html