The Benzene Ring of the Niebelung?

[Monte Davis]

David Kipen asks:

>Can anybody recommend a good essay on Wagnerian themes in Pynchon and/or
Tolkien?

One starting point is "Gravity's Rainbow: the Original Soundtrack" in

http://www.ham.muohio.edu/~krafftjm/pn/pn013.pdf


John Leonard, bless him and RIP: "Haunted by the ghost of his dead wife,
Mason starts a second family and bequeaths his own sons to the New World,
though it was Dixon who had wanted to stay in America. And Dixon, 'the
unwaverring Larrk of the Sanguine,' gone nymphing by moonlight for sea trout
in a stream of English consciousness, will see through his pride into the
minds of the secret sharers of the Earth. What a pity that he dies before
Romantic poetry or grand opera or psychoanalysis or Hollywood movies. In
Wagner, he might have been a bassoon."

http://www.thomaspynchon.com/mason-dixon/reviews/leonard.html

Happy hunting!

-Monte