Low-Lands, M&D, AtD; middles

[Monte Davis]

Long long ago in Pynchon Notes 7, Thomas Schaub spotted an intriguing
symmetry in “Low-Lands: “
the two halves of the story mirror one another as
the story slips through the neck of time into its own (and Flange’s)
Doppelganger
 The dump is at once the zero point of the story’s geography
and the dead center of the story, coming exactly midway in its 22-plus
pages
”

 

During the ATDATD, in discussing the book’s many mirrors and doublings,
Robin Landseadel noted this passage at the text-page-count center of the
hardcover,  just below the midpoint of p. 542 in the hardcover. 

 

Next evening Kit, having against his better judgment accompanied Pléiade to
her suite, found himself in some perplexity, for at some point in the deep
malediction of the hour she had mysteriously vanished. Only a moment before,
it seemed to him, she’d been there at the seaward window, poised against the
uncertain marine light, carefully mixing absinthe and Champagne to produce a
strange foaming louche. Now, with no sensible passage of time, the rooms
were resonant with absence. Next to the cheval-glass, Kit noticed a pale
dressing-gown, of all-but-insubstantial chiffon, not draped over a chair but
standing erect, now and then rippling from otherwise unsensed passages of
air, as if someone were inside of it, perhaps stirred by invisible forces
less nameable, its movements, disquietingly, not always matched by those of
its tall image in the mirror.

 

Recently I noticed the following at the text-page-count center of Mason &
Dixon, halfway down p. 387, Mitzi Redzinger visiting Dimdown in his room:

 

The Goose. She is untying her Cap, then taking it slowly off, unbinding and
shaking out her Hair. She is making it ripple for him. She is getting it to
catch the winter Light thro’ the Window. She is so flabbergasting this
Macaroni with it that he seems to fall into a contemplative Daze before the
deep Undulations, a Dreamer at the Edge of the Sea. Outdoors, the Snow is
upon the Glide yet again, and soon ’twill be Night.

 

I don’t find anything like this at the dead center of V. or GR or Vineland
or IV, but even if it’s only coincidence between ATD and M&D it’s a beaut.
I’m also reminded, irrelevantly, of the cover for the 1964 Bantam paperback
of V, the first Pynchon book I ever saw: the title as a giant stone carving
on a vanishing-point di Chirico plain, dark clouds overhead, with a
Botticelli-Venus woman in the foreground, her hair and her blue gown
rippling in the wind.

 

http://www.thomaspynchon.com/covers/v_cvr.html

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130706/e3442090/attachment.html>