Grasping for V. Group Read: first V. mention; second sighting

[Mark Kohut]

Ron Judy sources so probably The Waste Land:
"At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives    
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,"

Mr. Kerry, update that Companion,  but if the mercury-vapor lamps do make the hour violet,
P himself says they "turn everyone's faces green and ugly".....

I should more accurately have written 'ugly-making" in my post.... 

Later Pynchon, esp AtD, steadily finds vileness in streetlights, artificial light which is
dropped here like an early note in a lifelong orchestration of a vision...I suggest

I'll also add that natural human faces seeing each other are one of the basic good things 
in P's vision, I say.


----- Original Message ----
From: Ron Judy <sem4phore at gmail.com>
To: brook7 at sover.net
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, June 13, 2010 11:49:34 PM
Subject: Re: Grasping for V. Group Read: first V. mention; second sighting

Not sure these mercury-vapor lamps are "ugly", since I read this, our
first V, as an echo of Eliot's "at the violet hour", where (Wasteland,
'Fire Sermon', ln 215-23) Tiresias says:

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back    
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits    
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,    
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,    
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see    
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives    
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,    
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights    
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

The (V)iolet hour that allows the feeble prophet to see--see things,
sailors especially, moving homeward. This Pynchon V-light at the end
of the day is artificial, yes, but its appearance also seems to stake
out Pynchon's intervention into High Modernism that comes later. At
another level, yo-yoing as Homeric return, and Pound's Canto I, where
Odysseus, in Hades, encounters Tiresias as well:

And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban,
Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first:
"A second time? why? man of ill star,
Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?
Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever
For soothsay."
And I stepped back,
And he strong with the blood, said then: "Odysseus
Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,
Lose all companions."

Profane, wandering/returning sailor, man of ill star, loser of
companions, returns to the infernal city of Norfolk through this
V-"vision"--and so we begin in the finest epic tradition.