letter(My baby, she wrote me a) .

[Joseph Tracy]

  John Bailey
The picture on the postcard is pretty obviously meant to suggest
Lemuria by this point, too. So she's writing from Lemuria or whatever
that represents in the novel.

I also think her opener, "I wish you could see these waves", is
enormously suggestive. Waves have a kind of mythical power in IV (and
are important in AtD too). I don't know much 'bout science but I think
waves are pretty right-now, yeah? Anyone want to help out there? Waves
as opposed to discrete particles, planes, euclidean geometry or
something?

Joseph
Everyhing about the letter and the "opening" of its meaning in the  
story is layered. Doc asks himself if Shasta's expressed longing is  
fiction or real. The delivery via coconut sling is comic silliness  
that implies a kind of magical origin. The letter recalls a memory  
that seems particularly unromantic except in the gothic horror sense.  
It moves him into his memory and then into the LA landscape. This  
combined with the fact that Shasta herself seems a kind of dream  
reference to California's "highest" and most magically enshrouded  
places( Hollywood starlight/ Big LA money, politics, real estate,   
ancient earth-legend portals to other worlds,  Doc's true love).
So let me run my 3 layer interpretation of the structure of TRP's  
writing to the letter.

  Layer 1) the mythic/Jungian  on this level it seems a message about  
messages, that messages are both unreliable and dangerous ( Ouija  
sends them to hellish hole, Shasta's love not reliable, we hear what  
we want), but that messages ( both scientific, historic and intuitive) 
are also, both practically and to the life of the soul, indispensable  
(The earth is sending warnings that flow in like oil and dead birds  
on the waves, like distant islands melting and drowning, like the  
voice inside that says this is really wrong; don't go there)  It is  
also a message in the mythos of the story from a multi dimensional  
space about where and by whom the spirit of youth/earth wisdom/love   
is  being held captive: The Golden Fang, a dragon-like force of  
hoarding, corruption,  fear, violence, and control.

  Layer 2)  the fictive real :  On this layer the letter is a message  
that sends us on a romp into Doc's memory (furry freak brothers meet  
Ghostbusters) and sends Doc to the site where out of the hole has  
grown a building shaped like a golden fang which he enters to find  
more clues about this mysterious entity. (see below for more  
developed reprise of this layer)

Layer 3) the historic/real: The reference to the real world of 1970   
is a little hard to pinpont in the letter itself( though it could be  
taken as a reference to the nature of text) but is revealed in the  
Letter's effects. In some ways though, the letter itself  from the  
island,  from the land of the waves,  from the Pacific is  a  
reference to 2 things: 1) the messages from the Ocean about eco  
imbalance, about  natural limits, about the delights and ecstasy of  
waves.2) the  omnipresent messages about the rising importance of the  
Pacific rim: Vietnam, China, Japan, the west coast.   The letter also  
leads to the memory of the vision like visit to the Hole. Dark muddy,  
ragged, set in black skies pierced with fire, I see here a very  
loaded reference to Vietnam and the Vietnam war memorial. Ouija board  
messages( Gulf of Tonkin/ domino theories) fueled by lust for  
"drugs" ( steady supply of exploitable resources)  leads to a giant  
grave. But for some that grave is the fuel of a new empire, a golden  
fang.


  Laura
The movie reviewer-style referencing of movies and, perhaps, the used  
car-sellers referencing of cars, add a layer of pop-culture  
cheesiness (Velveetification?)to the story.  We're not getting the  
simple view of the omniscient narrator, we're getting the view  
filtered through a lens clouded by crappy pop culture.  The TV  
parodies are part of this.  Pynchon is using a filter of crappy  
culture, like fog moving in, to show us why the budding idealism of  
the 60s went under.
Joseph
Nice. One thing I first noticed in V was what you might call a  
democratic quality to Pychon's writing. He doesn't tell you what to  
think about the things he describes. Not that he has no opinions or  
that he has not carefully and artfully arranged what we encounter,  
but most action is described neutrally and because our inclination as  
readers is to trust a neutral narration as sympathetic, it can have  
startling and unpleasant effects. The newspeak in 1984 is loaded with  
melodramatic warnings , but the intention is to alert us to he power  
of  actual propaganda.  Pynchon expects more of the reader.

I think this democratic approach extends to the 3 layers of myth.  
fiction and journalism. These things an never be fully or neatly  
separated nor easily graded as to importance. Pynchon doesn't bother.  
They are treated as equally vital to a wholistic picture of the world.


, Mark Kohut wrote:

> There is some kind of 'lovingness' [my word. find a better.] goin'  
> on in the descriptions, yes?
>
> It reminds me of the way he, uniquely it seems, indicates so many  
> movies with the date. For some reason he wants us to 'get' the  
> whole NAME, Year of a car.  That that 'defines' it or something?

  Joseph
The lists and details are all part of the preservation of historic  
memory, an accurate mirror , including detritus.  Why is the name of  
a president you never met more historically relevant than the name of  
the car you drove or the drugs you took.

Mark Kohut wrote
"As time goes on the technical problems become more automatic, while  
the people problems [of traffic] become more surrealsitic. ----Henry  
Barnes, legendary traffic commish of NYC, quoted in Traffic, 2008 by  
Tom Vanderbilt.

"We spend more on driving than on food or health care. As of the last  
census, there were more cars than citizens."---Traffic

"Time and space are skewed in traffic; our vision is fragmented and  
often unclear."---Traffic

Joseph,
The centrality of the car to the American way of life is made real in  
this book. This ain't On the Road. The one thing you can't get away  
from in a car is everything the car implies, the suburb and city at  
the end of the journey, the traffic, the accidents, the cops, the  
roads, the gas, the oil, the oil wars, the destruction of wildness.