Inherent Hands

[bandwraith at aol.com]

He's begging the metonym- "All hands on deck."  The deck of the Golden 
Fang, of course, where we've long ago singled up all lines...


-----Original Message-----
From: m1ch1 <m1ch1 at gmx.ch>
To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Mon, Dec 1, 2014 7:23 am
Subject: Inherent Hands



Dear W.A.S.T.E.,
I got this quirk for noting and collecting symbolical and/or 
metaphorical uses of hands (in literature etc.) and on my second tour 
de IV (I had to read it again, before Anderson's images try to impose 
themselves and greatly enjoyed it) I stumbled across the following, 
beautiful series, which I thought is worth sharing with You:
 

Ch. 9 where Doc and Denis head out to the Boards place:
"Denis was along posing as his photographer, wearing a T-shirt with the 
familiar detail from Michelangelo's fresco The Creation of Adam, in 
which God is extending his hand to Adam's and they're just about to 
touch – except in this version God is passing a lit joint." 124
 
At the end of Ch. 12 where Doc dreamed he was a little kid again 
(talking about death and him finally needing to conform someday):
"He woke up into this particular season of onshore fogs and the 
unnatural rumbling of jets taking off and landing at LAX all night 
long, as if some hand at a control board had pushed the bass to an 
unexpected level, and he found the Indian bedspread on the couch where 
he crashed running red an orange dye from what could only be his tears. 
He walked around well into the mornig with a dim paisley pattern across 
half his face." 206
 
At the end of Ch. 14 after contemplating about John Garfield's last 
picture before being blacklisted, where he dies in the gutter:
"… and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he 
couldn't find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this 
little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, 
taken back into darkness . . . how a certain hand might reach terribly 
out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a 
doper and stubbing out for good." 255
 
There are further instances in IV consistant with this (e.g. Wild Bill 
Hickok's last poker hand (228), Coy faking his own death: tempting the 
hand of fate (300), Adrian killing the pornographer who tried to 
blackmail R.Reagan: your hour is at hand (322)), but they don't add 
much in terms of beauty of the sequence above. I think that part of 
what's so fascinating about Pynchon, at least for me, is this 
consistant (but nonetheless evolving) use of metaphors/symbols 
throughout his oevre. Every here and there you are reminded of a 
passage somewhere else. You get stuck in this web, webbing or text(ure) 
and happily roll over (re-read!) to entangle yourself further...
 
Kind regards,
Michael
 



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