On Grigori

[Mark Kohut]

In an essay on Melville, Yvor Winters riffs on the ocean in Moby Dick,
home of the white whale as symbol of evil but also of "the great white
squid, chaotic and formless, the symbol of chance in life"....
quoting Melville: '[it] undulated there on the billows, an unearthly,
formless, chance-like apparition of life".

Think TRP was alluding? I have always wondered Why Grigori?.....
.Later in GR, octopus is used in Frank Norris' sense, 'corporate
octopus" --Octopus: 'the shifting construction of animal instincts
along class lines'" writes one modern critic/historian.

A quick bit of research sez: Squids live in schools in the open sea.
Octopuses live in caves more solitarily; octopuses are
"bottom-feeders", Squids not.

That TRP gets every metaphor right, yes?
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l