V-2nd C4 The Search for Bridey Murphy

[alice wellintown]

Here we have but another search for ...well...for a quest narrative
that opens texts within texts within films, and the actors and their
biographies and stages within theaters and allusions to theatres .
Think Our Town. Great play you probably read it in high school. Now
called "Meta-theatrical." Here we have madam psy chokes us and a
little bit of hard times for good measure...Mr McChokumchild.
Mata-historical romance, anybody? Amy Elias? This is the term for the
so-called historical fiction P writes. I Guess. But here it is also
the theater within the theater within the boxes that P mixes up on us,
like a swift three card monte con man on the streets we were subjected
to in the last chapter. There, though... who really cares ...we are
bounced into James Fisk and his opera house and into the Baedekered
theatre where the V-point is Grant and the Banks and Railroads and
Suez...Henry Adams. Here, we have another, like Graves, like other
prolific breeders of roads not taken and more or less taken for a ride
or a long trip off a short pier and like Adams we learn nothing (only,
again, Adams is the exception) and it is, again, a dream and
impersonation narrative, a  story that sends reporters and other
curious blood hounds searching the Irish archives (the Irish have
built a handsome business out of keeping records, church and family
crest stuff that yanks love to research) for clues and facts and
speculation and tails round and round and get me off I'm getting dizzy
from these spinning yarns. Our Town? German Town? Irish? P does a
pretty poor job with German Town and NYC generally. He's much better
at places he has never seen. peaking of Irish, what we find here is
that brilliant Irish wit and play of language that young Fitzgerald
and young Joyce had too. It is the candy coated diamonds that lilt
with a sad chuckle than reach for a bottle.

On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 3:21 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> "... he waved [a dark-colored lump of gristle] triumphantly before Esther. 'Twenty-two years of social unhappiness, nicht wahr?  End of act one.'"
>
> As businessman and amateur hypnotist Morey Bernstein cut through layers of Virginia Tighe's consciousness to reveal her inner Irishwoman, so Schoenmaker cuts through layers of Esther's nose to reveal her inner Irishwoman, as he gives her the perfect little turned up Irish nose.
>
> He's not only relieving her of 22 years of personal unhappiness, he's cutting away thousands of years of ethnic oppression - removing that which identifies her as Jewish.  The German phrase he tosses in (he's an American, apparently)is a pretty pointed reference to you know what.  "End of act one" = Final Solution.
>
> Laura
>
> -----Original Message-----
>>From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
>>
>>"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)
>>
>
> and:
>
>>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 ...
>
>