V2nd, C3: pov in sec. viii

[alice wellintown]

As we move through the text it becomes more and more apparent that
Baedeker Land is a Stage--a theatre/theater. That Victoria plays with
her dolls reminds us of how playwrites and others who write for the
theatre, and some novelist too no doubt, use dolls to act out their
plots on a mini-stage. Sullivan is seen doing this in Topsy-Turvey (a
film I recommend).  A recent production of Ibsen's A Doll's House
featured little people actors. Anyway, the micro-cos mic events, the
statge within the stage or play within the play here, the mirror
world, is lit with stage lights and P applies stage theory and stage
lighting theor here in V.--an idea he will expound upon in GR, VL, and
so on. In any event, one reason I read Sphere, not to dismiss the
brilliant Monk reading because, again, P mixes in Biography with his
parody and romance here, as a negative figure, as a Puppet, under the
spot light, despite the fac that the ivory sax can be read as Monk's
piano keys, is that he plays an ivory sax and ivory is a negative
symbol in this text--Heart of Darkness. Why wouldn't McClintic be
subjected to the same inanimating
forces that affect the others? The description of him begins
with his "swinging his ass off" (his screw is turned) and his  "hard skin, as if
it were part of his skull: every vein and whisker on that
head stood out sharp and clear under the green baby spot:
you could see the twin lines running down from either side
of his lower lip, etched in by the force of his embouchure,
looking like extensions of his mustache."

To compare Sphere's gig with the wind: In V. the wind  blows
through Man's lost and found faith,  his threadbare
community, his sense of sterility, of alienation, of being
alone, vulnerable to entropy, nihilism, despair. The wind,
indeed the entire cosmos is indifferent. But this Void, this
great big white hole, this un-wholeness, we might say
"anti-paranoid" universe is too much for anyone to stand for
long and so by a new paranoia, a stencilezed quest, not the
religious paranoia of the mythological quests of the past,
but of religious dimensions, man becomes a new JOB, a Man
caught in a new history, a history that is being controlled
by anti-human, anti-mythical, anti-natural, forces. Man
(Job) is now caught between cosmic indifference and a
conspiracy against life.

I think the inanimate affects even Jazz here in V. An Ivory
sax is not what Coleman played. There is some Irony of
course, after reading GR, that he did play a plastic sax.

Will the wind ever remember/
The names it has blown in the past/
With its crutch, its old age, and its wisdom/
It whispers, no, this will be the last/
And the wind cries Mary...

"On an evening in 1946…on the western coast of Mallorca; the
sun was setting into think clouds, turning all the visible
sea into a sheet of pearl-gray. Perhaps they may have felt
like the last two gods-the last inhabitants-of a watery
earth; or perhaps-but it would be unfair to infer. Whatever
the reason, the scene played as follows:" V.HP.48

Graves wrote The White Goddess on the island of Mallorca.  I
think we might bear in mind that Stencil, a typical
Pynchonian character, a character like Slothrop or Greta,
with too many identities, is invested not only with the
writings of Henry Adams, Robert Graves, several others, but
with their biographies as well.

Note how Berger, in his essay on VL, demonstrates that
Pynchon works with overlapping stereotypes,  ideologies of
extreme, generating huge laughter through the use of parody
and irony.

A submarine scungille farm? Strange! Mr. Pynchon may not be
a black humorist, that term may be of no use here, but he is
certainly trying very hard, here as a young man up to his
hips in books, to stumble about in Joyce's giant overshoes.
HHH, VVV, MMM, what fun Mr. Pynchon is having with Mr.
Graves.

scungille shell:  Stencil's scungille farm, 62; 178; what
Botticelli's Venus seems to be standing in; "There's nothing
inside. Only the scungille shell." 370; 384; [Education of
Henry Adams]

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/adams.html#virgin

Graves tells us that scungille,  periwinkle, scallop, were
aphrodisiacs, sacred to Aphrodite, identified by the shell,
the mirror ("know thyself") and vanity, the comb (originally
a plectrum for plucking lyre strings) and heartlessness,
associated with the Moon Goddess Eurynome, Botticelli's
Birth Of Venus is an exact icon of her cult, in English
ballad poetry she is the bitter sweetness of love and danger
for travelers, mariners in foreign ports, like the ports of
Malta.  See The White Goddess Chapter 22, Ophielia's song in
Shakespeare's Hamlet, the introduction of the idea of
Romantic Love in Western Europe, Love In The Western World,
Denis De Rougemont.

Merry, May,  Marah (Hebrew for brine), myrrh the gift of one
of those wise guys, MARY, Merry old England and Merry Robin
(can't get more phallic than Robin) Hood, "Who'll hunt the
Wren?" cries Robin the Bobbin, who is the Devil, the dark
deep in the middle of Stencil's shells, the black mass and
kiss his ass, down where only GOD knew what lived.
What is living down in that Rock? White Ivory?

This is the "nacreous mass of inference, poetic license
[...] imaginative anxiety or historical care, which is
recognized by no one."

some fragments:


Inside and outside Romans 2:28

Vera: Truth-Christ / Veronica: Image of the Truth-Christ

I am the kight, the light, the vera, and the way.

So what has this stage lighting theory to do with gnostic light?
Gnostics believed in a spiritual form of light, a
preternatural Light, existing beyond the dualism of light
and darkness, a light that casts no shadow, in fact
it has no form, and it is immutable.  Because of a
cosmological drama, explained differently by various sects,
the preternatural light became imprisoned, and for Gnostics,
redemption is tantamount to collecting, salvaging, and
carrying to heaven the sparks of this divine light. Pynchon inverts
the myth. Remember, the world in Pynchon's fiction is often inverted,
or a reflection or, as with the Tweeds, not a double or twin, but a
mirrored existence.

In GR, recall, that the  divine light of the
Gnostics ("the pure light of the Zero" , "the light of
"revelation", "the light of illumination") which emanates
from the "Center" or the "the zero" is Not a Pleromatic
light but a terrifying and destructive radiance, identified
with the brightness of the Rocket.

An orange on orange light?  A white light.


 This is the light shining from "the Presence feared and wanted." This is the
light that is  "definitely not human" but of perfect
whiteness and void of heat just like  the "Poisonous Angel",
this is the light in "all its bleaching and terror" that is
totally indifferent to humanity.


 III Maccabees

 The Greek book called The Third Book of Maccabees itself
has nothing to do with the Maccabean period. Its content is
a legend, a miraculous story of deliverance, which is also
independently told--in another historical context--by
 Josephus (Against Apion II, 5). In III Maccabees the story
takes place during the reign of Ptolemy IV Philopator
(reigned 221-203 BCE). The central episode of the book is
the oppression of Egyptian Jews, culminating with an
anti-Jewish decree by the King. The Jews who were registered
for execution were brought into the hippodrome outside
 of Alexandria; the King had ordered 500 elephants to be
drugged with incense and wine for the purpose of crushing
the  Jews, but by God's intercession "the beasts turned
round against the armed hosts [of the king] and began to
tread them  under foot and destroy them." The Jews fixed
annual
celebrations of this deliverance. The book was probably
written at  the end of the 1st century BCE by an Alexandrian
Jew in a period of high anti-Jewish tension.



On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 11:38 AM, Krafft, John M. <krafftjm at muohio.edu> wrote:
> Intriguing suggestion that the pov is that of the allegorical statue of Tragedy: could it see itself turned orange by the sun? Would Stencil's (experimentally?) adopting such a pov have to redound so much to his ethical discredit?
>
> Has anyone tried to block the scene? Do all the actors in it enter from the same, stage end of the corridor? Is the window at that end? (Assuming the theater is an actual historical one, we might find out which direction it faced and deduce whether the stage side had a west-facing window.) The statue? If Lepsius enters Box 2 from the stage end, does everyone else come in at the other end and enter Box 3, or come in the other end and pass box 2 to get to 1, or come in the stage end and pass Box 2 to get to 3, or come in the stage end and enter Box 1, or what?
>
> jmk
>
> --
>
> John M. Krafft / English
> Miami University–Hamilton / 1601 University Blvd. / Hamilton, OH 45011-3399
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> E-mail: krafftjm at muohio.edu
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