IVIV Golden Fang = dragon's tooth?

[Doug Millison]

Good stuff on Chinese dragons, David Morris!

A fine book on the subject, learned and poetic:  The Divine Woman:  
Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T'Ang Literature by Edward H.  
Schafer.  http://books.google.com/books?id=Z8NJBAAACAAJ&dq=dragons+and+rain+maidens&ei=otK8SsvnJoPKkQS8lK33Dg 
   Schafer was a professor in the Dept of Oriental Languages at UC  
Berkeley, where he was a teacher of an old friend of mine, Charles  
Zemalis, a minor Beatnik poe who lived across the hall from me at the  
Danbert Arms building on College Ave., across from the Julia Morgan  
Center in Berkeley, in the late '70s.

If the Golden Fang is a dragon's tooth poking up through the surface  
of the Earth, that seems a nice link back to M&D's ley lines and  
geomancy.  Also brings to mind the Buddah tooth holy relic that pops  
up in the news now and again.

The legend of Cadmus and the sowing of the dragon's teeth plays a big  
role in McLuhan's books, _The Gutenberg Galaxy_ and _Understanding  
Media_.  McLuhan interprets the myth in the context of Cadmus'  
introduction of  the Phoenician alphabet and literacy which ushers in  
the manuscript age.http://books.google.com/books?id=y4C644zHCWgC&dq=Gutenberg+Galaxy&source=gbs_navlinks_s 
   (search for Cadmus, at least one passage is included in the book  
preview at that url).  I'm not sure if we should classify the dragon  
who supplied the teeth that Cadmus sowed, as mean fire-breathing  
Western dragon, or as the rather more nurturing dragon of Chinese  
tradition.

I like the notion that the Golden Fang, for all that it resembles the  
other shadowy conspiracies in Pynchon's novels, is as much a  
distraction from what the police and government are actually doing in  
IV.  While the local police are covering up murders and teaming up  
with right-wing organizations, the FBI seems to have free use of the  
emerging Internet and in IV, an erosion of civil liberties that  
Pynchon calls out specifically in the passage frequently quoted here,  
about the police stopping somebody in the street and using computers  
to identify and nail the guy.  Whatever the Golden Fang might  
represent, and what ill it may be doing in the world -- that's  
speculative, mythical, or like a comic book or sitcom as others have  
pointed, maybe that is just a joke, yet at the same time IV seems  
quite clear on the fascist tendencies of the police in their day-to- 
day work, just as the mental health establishment appears firmly on  
the side of brainwashing and re-grooving elements deemed dangerous to  
the monied powers that be.

On the idea that some of us might be reading "too much" into IV, I  
don't see how that's possible really, since a reader never does reach  
the end of any of Pynchon's chains of allusion and direct references  
to other works.

Add to that the notion, to which I fully subscribe, that Pynchon's  
string of stories and novels amount to "one big novel" due to the  
number of textual connections between the various novels. At this  
level, I see IV working as just another "chapter" and worthy of close  
attention. By publishing his novels, generally, at intervals separated  
by long silences, he has given himself plenty of time to go over the  
manuscript of the latest "chapter" so he can tie it in tightly with  
his previous "chapters."  IV picks up threads -- singles all lines? --  
from all of P's previous work. Please note that I'm not making the  
claim that Pynchon is actually doing this, I have no way of knowing  
that even if I'd be surprised to learn definitively that he hasn't  
consciously done this.  But reading all of his books multiple times,  
and closely comparing one to the rest, this approach works for me as a  
way to come to grips with the novels and stories individually, and as  
a single oeuvre.  As far as I'm concerned, it's all good.  Your  
mileage may vary, of course.