V-2nd - 2: clocks and mirrors

[kelber at mindspring.com]

After the off-putting navy-boy antics and human-car love scene in Chapter One, here's what Chapter Two offers:

Pages 40-41 (Harper Perennial)

"Directly across the room from Rachel was a mirror, hung high on the wall, and under the mirror a shelf which held a turn-of-the-century clock.  The double face was suspended by four golden flying buttresses above a maze of works, enclosed in clear Swedish lead glass.  The pendulum didn't swing back and forth but was in the form of a disc, parallel to the floor and driven by a shaft which paralleled the hands at six o'clock.  The disc turned a quarter-revolution one way, then a quarter-revolution the other, each reversed torsion on the shaft advancing the escapement a notch.  Mounted on the disc were two imps or demons, wrought in gold, posed in fantastic attitudes.  Their movements were reflected in the mirror along with the window at Rachel's back, which extended from floor to ceiling and revealed the branches and green needles of a pine tree.  The branches whipped back and forth in the February wind, ceaseless and shimmering, and in front of them the two demons performed their metronomic dance, beneath a vertical array of golden gears and ratchet wheels, levers and springs which gleamed warm and gay as any ballroom chandelier.

Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45 degrees, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out.  Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose?  Or was it only the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward bow of a nose-bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a reversal of ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thence-forth run on mirror-time; work and love by mirror-light and be only, till death stopped the heart's ticking (the metronome's music) quietly as light ceases to vibrate, an imp's dance under the century's own chandeliers ..."

This is why we obsess over Pynchon, is it not?  Intricate passages, not always so easy to parse, that sends our minds in multiple directions.  There may have been a few in his Slow Learner collection, but this is certainly the first and finest that the world got to sample.

V. is full of mirror and clock and clock-in-mirror imagery.  The story opens with the elaborate sun sliced by a mirror image (although I still have difficulty with that one:  I understand the image of the sun bisected by a plane, but if that plane is a mirror, embedded in the sun, what's being reflected where?).  Later, one of the V. versions will have a false eye with a clock imprinted on it.  What does she see when she looks at the clock in the mirror?

The above description of the mechanized clock certainly sends me on flights of fancy.  But Pynchon's emphasizing the mechanistic aspects - the demons have no free will, on this side of the mirror, at any rate.  

The mirror reflects the mechanized clock with its pre-determined demons, but also the tree outside the window, moving with apparent freedom in the wind.  Do these images of not-free and free cancel each other out in the mirror world.

Proposed:  Clocks in Pynchon=mechanistic=lack of free will = bad.

Mirrors=good?  They're rigid glass (owlglass?) but silvered over so that they invite us to escape into other realms.  Are they free will or just a passage to free will?

Laura