V-2nd - 2: clocks and mirrors

[Mark Kohut]

I'm still puzzling before I bloviate BUT....

I think the fact that it is a turn-of-the-century clock is somehow very 
important. 


Henry Adams always sez: 
"In 1900, the continuity snapped". --Henry Adams

And we know how important that time in history is to TRP....




 


----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Tue, June 29, 2010 4:43:54 PM
Subject: V-2nd - 2: clocks and mirrors

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