Atdtda37: Back from a wordless, timeless distraction, 1055-1057

[Paul Nightingale]

Back to Lake, also dreaming, an effective way of establishing the nature of
her relationship with Deuce: each is confined to dreaming that excludes the
other. In particular, Lake's dreams offer her an alternative life, one that
might involve 'pretending family life' (1056); one that will require her to
join explorers and 'leave behind a lover or husband'; one, even, that will
supply the Durkheimian social solidarity so absent from her life in Los
Angeles ('churches filled with townspeople in prayer', 'the peeling city,
the joyous population'). Moreover, this is a recurring dream ('Lake has
dreamed more than once ...' etc, 1055; or the possibility that 'this time he
has left her for another', 1056) and so Lake might find the content
familiar, much as her waking life is based on repetition.

She observes the 'young girls of the town' also repeating behaviour that has
been established '[b]y long-standing custom' (1055), and then, the section's
final sentence suggests she identifies with these girls, has made herself
one of their number: '... the sort of recurring dream a long-suffering movie
heroine would expect to wake from to find herself pregnant at last' (1057).
The 'recurring dream' follows the earlier 'sometimes thinking about a penis
is all it takes to get pregnant' (1055). 

However, before that ending, she becomes one of the 'party of explorers'
(1056), even though 'there is no one to confide in, the rest of the party
are indifferent ...' etc. The girls 'play their ever-autumnal days away'
(1055-1056), a striking way to describe childhood/youth. Down the page, the
attempt to rescue the child seems endless, 'the ice must be laboriously
melted away with rock salt' and 'day and night the work goes on' (1056).
That the dream fails to recognise the passage of time corresponds to Lake's
own waking existence, just as Deuce's absence from the dream corresponds to
his ongoing absence from their marriage. The resolution of the dream sees
the child 'reunited with her parents', the opposite of course to what has
happened in Lake's life, so the dream, perhaps, offers an alternative to
what has been her life.

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l