V--2nd, Chap 9..thoughts requested

[Mark Kohut]

YES!....green breast of the new world.....AND, the nurturing
part of a female if female nurturing could rule.................


----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sat, October 30, 2010 9:12:22 AM
Subject: Re: V--2nd, Chap 9..thoughts requested

I do think it's worth it to consider the "Breasts" that are eaten.
Quite a haunting detail. Rather opposed to Roth's and the Giant
Adenoid, these Breasts are not Kafkaesque or Caricature or any part of
Satire (MS or otherwise), but are deeply Romantic. We can trace them
to from Keats and the British Romantics into America and down into her
Long Island Poet's Leaves of Grass and, before Eliot's Wastelands of
European Culture, to the Breasts in Fitzgerald's _The Great Gatsby_
and specifically, to the famous final reverie: And as the moon rose
higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I
became aware of the old Island that flowered once for Dutch eyes—a
fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees
that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to
the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted
moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this
continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither
understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with
something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. And, to the the
Virgin becoming a Dynamo (Flapper), Myrtle, who is run down by the
Dyanmo: The "death car" as the newspapers called it, didn't stop; it
came out
of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment and then
disappeared around the next bend. Michaelis wasn't even sure of its
color--he told the first policeman that it was light green. The other
car, the one going toward New York, came to rest a hundred yards
beyond, and its driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life
violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick, dark
blood with the dust.

Michaelis and this man reached her first but when they had torn open
her shirtwaist still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left
breast was swinging loose like a flap and there was no need to listen
for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped at the
corners as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous
vitality she had stored so long.