Question re IV: from epic to everyday

[Mark Kohut]

The best modern NEW Shakespeare annotations [Arden editions] are wonderful (if one has the time
and inclination) for simply suggesting by quoted associations how a notion in Plutarch might
be buried in a Shakespeare couplet.....how even a phrase from Plutarch,  or Montaigne--or contemporaries
or ANYONE he is likely to have read might be reflected in Shakespeare's lines.........
 
this is of a different order than annotating a story from Ovid that S. clearly uses (and invariably) changes for his genius use.
 
In that spirit---that is loose annotation--- I want to offer the theme of Life Against Death--which we are almost
sure P read--see famous essay on----as (part of what) is contained in the line
about sexual desire from the epic to the everyday......................................
 
leading to, in Brown, what happens when it is thwarted as it always has been in History....
 

From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2011 7:11 AM
Subject: Re: Question re IV: from epic to everyday

Janos,
It always helps us when you provide a page number so that we can read
the excerpt in context. Here, Pynchon slides into the local dialect so
the words "everyday" and "epic" describe a range of sexual desire. The
narrator or character, in what appears to be a typical Pynchonian
paranoid reverie, wonders if the dark forces or dark crews,  who work
for greed and fear, have been there all this time, even at every
counter-revolutionary event, working to reclaim the power of the
people for the forces of greed and fear.  Although a common enough
theme in Pynchon's California trilogy, here the Oedipa-Complex
paranoia that Pynchon works wonders with in CL49 as he drives the
quest narrative with a protagonist who, to use Foucault's term, is "We
Other Victorians," here we get the Van Meter and Zoyd and Oedipa's
husband Mucho and Larry version that is subjected to the satire of
drug induced hippie stupidity and paranoid grand delusions of
surrender.


2011/8/31 János Széky <miksaapja at gmail.com>:
> What I understand here is the emotion but not the exact meaning.
> Please help me with the syntax:
>
> "Was it possible, that at every gathering—concert, peace rally,
> love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East,
> wherever—those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the
> music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to
> everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and
> fear? "
>
> I mean, are both "from epic to everyday" and "for the ancient forces
> of greed and fear" related directly to "reclaiming", or is "from epic
> to everyday" an apposition to "sexual desire"?
>
> Thanks,
> János
>
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