IVIV8: A long time in politics

[alice wellintown]

I suspect that readers of Pynchon, frustrated by or unhappy with his
mediated Reels & Reals  would enjoy Toni Morrison because of the way
her characters, unlike Pynchon's, promise and deliver flight out an
open window. P's characters can float around the frame or margins, but
never fly to freedom.

The epigraph to Song of Solomon—“The fathers may soar / And the
children may know their names”—is the first reference to one of the
novel’s most important themes. While flight can be an escape from
constricting circumstances, it also scars those who are left behind.
Solomon’s flight allowed him to leave slavery in the Virginia cotton
fields, but it also meant abandoning his wife, Ryna, with twenty-one
children. While Milkman’s flight from Michigan frees him from the dead
environment of Not Doctor Street, his flight is also selfish because
it causes Hagar to die of heartbreak. The novel’s epigraph attempts to
break the connection between flight and abandonment. Because Pilate,
as Milkman notes, is able to fly without ever lifting her feet off the
ground, she has mastered flight, managing to be free of subjugation
without leaving anyone behind.

I sent a long post on Shadrack's National Suicide Day, from Sula 1919.
Shadrack, appropriates a day and the community adopts it. This is in
stark contrast to the NCAA TV schedule.

Another alternative to P is Tan.  At the end of "A Game of Chess", the
protagonist of Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club takes flight from her tyranical
Mother.

Another: In The Big Lebowki The Dude takes flight, Th Dude abides.

This doesn't happen in Pynchon.

A flight to is always a flight from. Dorothy is running to and away
from home, to the wizard and from the witch, but in P, the only way
out is to scatter, to be broekn up like the boy in the Willie Wonka TV
screen.





On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 3:38 AM, Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com> wrote:
> The Real, being the promise of an unmediated reality, the text as an open window. Impossible, of course. Of particular interest, perhaps: "... every Tuesday or Cheap Pizza Nite" (11). The marketing ploy appropriates Tuesday-outside-representation and represents it as something only locals, in the know, will recognise. This moment and the start of 8.2, Doc watching TV, provide the references that date the action and construct a time-line outside the action. Each moment, of course, in the writing, provides the means of its own de(con)struction.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Monroe [mailto:against.the.dave at gmail.com]
>
> The Real, or The Symbolic?
>
>
>