V-2nd C4 The Search for Bridey Murphy

[Dave Monroe]

"Next evening, prim and nervous-thighed in a rear seat of the
crosstown bus, Esther divided her attention between the delinquent
wilderness outside and a paperback copy of The Search for Bridey
Murphy." (V., Ch 4, p. 97)


"In which Esther gets a nose job"

Note, of course, again, the V-shaped typesetting here ...


"the crosstown bus"

"Kowalewski sees the opening paragraphs of the chapter as a
'functional passage ... in that it seems sublimated to a narrative
purpose: moving Esther from one place to another.  But it is not where
readers are being taken that matters here, but how they are being led,
through what alien country the narrative is directing us....  The
scene refers, and this is characteristic of Pynchon more generally, to
what is largely invisible.  There is a density of verbal fragments
which, though charged with visual energy, are not confidently
visualized by the reader.  The effort of moving from one visual
increment to the next involves an intensity of 'almost seeing.'  this
semi-invisibility makes the surreal a part of the created effect....
There is an intensified sense of the unknown, the literally but not
unimaginatively unseen (201-2)."

--J. Kerry Grant, Companion to V., p. 61, quoting ...

Kowalewski, Michael.  "For Once, Then, Pynchon."
   Texas Studies in Literature and Language 28, No. 2
   (Summer 1986): 182-208.

http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/companion_to_v/

... also, "crosstown," cf. (compare/contrast with?) Benny's subway yo-yoing ...


"delinquent wilderness"

The United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency was
established by the United States Senate in 1953 to investigate the
problem of juvenile delinquency.

[...]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Subcommittee_on_Juvenile_Delinquency

The Senate Investigation

ttp://www.crimeboss.com/history03-1.html

Transcripts

http://www.thecomicbooks.com/1954senatetranscripts.html


The Search for Bridey Murphy

The Press: Yes, Virginia, There Is a Bridey
Monday, Jun. 18, 1956

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,862245,00.html

In 1952, Colorado businessman and amateur hypnotist  Morey Bernstein
put housewife Virginia Tighe of Pueblo, Colorado in a trance that
sparked off startling revelations about Tighe's alleged past life as a
19th-century Irishwoman and her rebirth in the United States 59 years
later. Bernstein used a technique called hypnotic regression, during
which the subject is gradually taken back to childhood. He then
attempted to take Virginia one step further, before birth, and
suddenly was astonished to find he was listening to Bridey Murphy.

[...]

... Most scientists today are satisfied that everything Virginia Tighe
said can be explained as a memory of her long-forgotten childhood.

The Search for Bridey Murphy was also made into a 1956 movie starring
Teresa Wright as Ruth Simmons....

[...]

In Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963), a character called Esther is reading
The Search for Bridey Murphy as she is sitting on a bus. This occurs
in the fourth chapter of the novel, "In which Esther gets a nose job".

[...]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridey_Murphy

Bridey Murphy

http://skepdic.com/bridey.html

http://www.survivalafterdeath.org.uk/books/ducasse/critical/25.htm

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/522/is-it-possible-to-recall-past-lives-through-hypnosis

The Search for Bridey Murphy (1956)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049729/


"life after death.... metempsychosis ... and the rest of a weird canon
of twentieth-century metaphysics we've come now to associate with the
city of Los Angeles and similar regions"

Not to mention with Thomas Pynchon ...