TR 2.3 - Homecoming?

[Richard Ryan]

I read (at this point in the narrative) Wyatt as being in a full
psychotic break.  His manic and urgent psychosis stand in contrast to
his father's: the Rev. has the stolid, almost catatonic demeanor of a
long-term resident on a mental ward.

On Mon, Aug 8, 2011 at 3:34 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Literally psychotic and not just out of touch with the reality of options he
> should see?
>
> No, not literally psychotic I felt when I read it the first time.
>
> (I am away from a copy at the moment but will reread soon enough)
>
>
> From: Richard Ryan <himself at richardryan.com>
> To: Pynchon-L <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Sunday, August 7, 2011 7:46 AM
> Subject: TR 2.3 - Homecoming?
>
> The 'soundtrack" of Wyatt's return to the unnamed New England town he
> grew up in (which we know, thanks to the Annotations, to be modeled on
> Berlin, Connecticut) is a crazed internal monologue of Joycean
> intensity.  The incredibly dense, highly allusive wanderings of our
> hero's mind are at this point both wildly entertaining and
> intimidating in their complexity.  Are we safe saying that Wyatt at
> this point is entirely psychotic?  Could we go so far as to say all
> the significant characters in this chapter - Wyatt's family circle as
> it were - have all gone or remain mad?
>
> The motif, begun in the last chapter, is one of both flight and
> return: a flight from the neurotic wasteland of the city,
> theoretically toward the healing refuge of home.  But Wyatt's maniacal
> plans to redeem himself with a re-immersion in the ministry - and in
> his earlier theological studies - mask his "real" entry into a
> hallucinatory realm of pre-Christian pagan mythology.  This is less a
> homecoming than a journey to an entirely separate reality.
>
>
>



-- 
Richard Ryan
New York and the World
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround
him. The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself.
All progress depends on the unreasonable man." - Shaw