IVIV music

[alice wellintown]

A close reading of the use of Mandalas in the romance, GR reveals what
we discover by a close reading of all Pynchon
adaptations of conventional acceptation of Mythological ( in Grave's
sense) symbolism. Thomas Schaub's (and others, Cowart and Stark, for
example) claim that TRP's use of the Mandala in GR invokes some
"integrating force which spars with the disintegrating
forces of analysis, and is itself a symbol capable of uniting both (as
it unites all oppositions)."

Religious or mythical forms of integration, as is the case in nearly
all other matters where
religion/myth  are invoked in GR (the exceptions are keys to
understanding the themes of GR--and verbal or oral debate and the oral
tradition are exceptions), have been secularized and profaned by
analytic forms of integration. In other words, THEY are
secular/analytical desecualrized avatars of the great big
religious/mytholocial history P builds his novel (not unlike Joyce) up
from.

The problem is,  secular history or the Modern condition. For Modern
man, all attempts to integrate,
be it with Mandalas or social scientific theory--Freud to Brown--do
not provide what religion or myth once could. So
the integrative function of the mandala is now only a secularized
analytical mandala (Jung's mandalas, for
example).

These, like Ishmael's Etymologies and Extracts, not to mention his
mappings of the whale's anatomy--he tattoos it to his body when he
runs out of paper, function allegorically, as in M-D, often to expose
Modern Man's inclination or disposition towards
Paranoid (there are several forms of Paranoia in GR, here I mean
Paranoia as epistemological process, the Modern Mind
with all its aggregated apocalyptic momentum)  processing of
experience and his obsession with reading/writing/mapping the mystery,
the whale, the world, the "ungraspable phantom of life."

In other words it goes to one of the big themes,the one that says that
when Paranoid Modern Man attempts to take refuge in myth or its
symbols, rituals, and so on, his attempts, his Quest, in counter
distinction to the historical questers (Tannhauser, Pig Hero and so
on), is secularized and leads to annihilation, first of the
self--scattered, community, and the Kingdom of Life.