More Misc. V-2nd. The profaning of The Street

[alice wellintown]

I'm not exactly sure what Irony is, but I do spend a lot of time with
smart young people, kids really, who are about the age P was when he
composed V., and who are way too swift to fall for that three types of
irony deninition dished out when I was a girl trying to become a
Catholic priest and getting my brains bashed in by Jesuits, and I read
a lot about it, including Kierkegaard's mamoth study, but I do know
that young P, like most sharp kids his age, enjoyed irony and was
tickled by a master of the ironic named Henry. It is odd. How do we
plumb that? How do we reconcile that? We don't. For Kierkegaard, for
henry Adams (others, see the list in the Wiki entry for "Irony"), and
for P, the sustained agon prevails, it must "swallow its own stomach."

The Nunc Age? Seems ironic to me. Benney, son of Prometheus and Job;
thw worm wiggles back head ro tail.

CHAPTER XXXV
NUNC AGE (1905)
NEARLY forty years had passed since the ex-private secretary landed at
New York with the ex-Ministers Adams and Motley, when they saw
American society as a long caravan stretching out towards the plains.
As he came up the bay again, November 5, 1904, an older man than
either his father or Motley in 1868, he found the approach more
striking than ever -- wonderful -- unlike anything man had ever seen
-- and like nothing he had ever much cared to see. The outline of the
city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied
meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have
asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great
masses of stone and steam against the sky. The city had the air and
movement of hysteria, and the citizens were crying, in every accent of
anger and alarm, that the new forces must at any cost be brought under
control. Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by
man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world
irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid. All New York
was demanding new men, and all the new forces, condensed into
corporations, were demanding a new type of man -- a man with ten times
the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type -- for whom they
were ready to pay millions at sight. As one jolted over the pavements
or read the last week's newspapers, the new man seemed close at hand,
for the old one had plainly reached the end of his strength, and his
failure had become catastrophic. Every one saw it, and every municipal
election shrieked chaos. A traveller in the highways of history looked
out of the club window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue, and felt
himself in Rome, under Diocletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious
of the compulsion, eager for the solution, but unable to conceive
whence the next impulse was to come or how it was to act. The
two-thousand-years failure of Christianity roared upward from
Broadway, and no Constantine the Great was in sight.



On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 11:44 AM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> Yes, it's odd that Profane sees some archetypical Street as a symbol of alienation, loss, hopelessness, rootlessness, etc.  The New York streets were/are teeming with life, activity, culture, spontaneity, multiculturism.  Not the best metaphor.
>
> LK
>
> -----Original Message-----
>>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>>Sent: Aug 22, 2010 10:04 AM
>>To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>>Subject: More Misc. V-2nd. The profaning of The Street
>>
>>The late Tony Tanner, great early Pynchon appreciator, in his introduction
>>to Shakespeare's history plays, makes this literary "historical" observation
>>(paraphrase
>>w addition, not a direct quote)
>>
>>The Medieval morality plays, with characters named such as Mercy and Mortality
>>[Cf.]
>>or even more Pynchonianly like Crafty Conveyance and Cloaked
>>Collusion.............
>>took their show to the street, literally....................the street was
>>"holy' not profane then
>>
>>later, when 'everything became theater", maybe...........plays went back
>>indoors..............
>>Why am I reminded of the movie theater metaphor and film motif of GR?..........
>>[I know.  I'm Kutely Krazy].....
>>
>>Tanner also remarks that Shakespeare, who virtually invented History plays,
>>brought
>>a plot, an imposed meaning on English history, when most historiography was,
>>more simply.
>>chronicles [Hollinshead]......Although some historians started to see English
>>history as morally
>>
>>meaningful, Shakespeare saw it with much greater richness and
>>'ambiguity'......................
>>
>>Which leads me to reflect, uninsightfully, on Pynchon's seeing of history,
>>starting fully in V.
>>
>>It is a kind of critical cliche to say: P sees NO moral meaningfulness, no unity
>>[thanks Henry A.
>>and Alice] in history, in fact he sees a lot of evil multiplicity, yes?
>>
>>
>>
>
>