2 notes section 9; 2 notes section 10

[ish mailian]

Bravo!
Yeah, I love this.

On Saturday, May 21, 2016, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Section 9
> pg 48  I am reading Robert Graves white Goddess; don’t quite know why
> apart from a returning interest in the decimated remains of pre Christian
> cultures of the British isles. (White Goddess is very dense,  a steady
> stream of literary , mythological, alphabetic probings, guesswork, built
> from the handful of oldest texts.)
>
> All that to say that the opening lines from Jessica’s dream is very
> reminiscent of the language in these ancient Brythonic poems. They often
> involve journeys to cities or castles with names like the Glass Fortress or
> Fairy Fortess. So she sees something stalking throught the city of smoke,
> gathering children, who wail with “dollful”, not doleful, and piteous
> cries.  I remember one line, I think from the spoils of Anuwyn,” doleful to
> the day of doom”.  She is also a smoker who has a bunch of dolls. I think
> this language is partly showing a side of her that connects her to myth and
> her own maternal instincts. She rises to tidy Roger’s strewn clothes.  Like
> her first dart to the bull’s eye, there is something about Jessica SwanLake
> that hits the mark, sees things others miss. Some  listers see her as a
> predator, but I think that is oversimplified; she is looking for safety, a
> panda (or maybe a baby) to name Michael. Michael, the  invincible warrior
> angel who battles with evil.
>
> pg. 60 Couldn’t they be children again dreaming of Christmas as holy
> comfort, not sheep on the bare hills under the Star’s awful radiance.
>
>  Again the maternal instinct that these abandoned houses can again be safe
> homes. There is a clear trans-temporal reference to the The Atomic weapon
> that has replaced God, the random destruction that has replaced dreams and
> beliefs. In this chapter we see most acutely and sympathetically the inner
> struggle of many of Pynchon’s women between men who represent the myth and
> practicality of safety though strength and enduring beliefs, and that
> individual who follows his own song lines but probaly loves her in a way
> that is its own mythos made real, not image, not comforting, not the stuff
> of dreams, but 2 made 1.      (This choice is both personal and  a social
> choice that obviously continues to play out in powerful ways. Is it
> allegory? Can one employ alegorical implications without the work becoming
> allegory? Is there something true in allegory? Faust may be allegory but
> isn’t it also deeply true? It seems to me to have to do with the
> credibility of the individual humans.  )
>
> Section 10
> pg. 61 The return address tells us we are in St. Veronica’s again. This
> implies to me that Dr. Spectro was playing Pointsman in section 8 ,
> disapproving of PP2’s proposed research not from research ethics, as he
> said,  but because he wanted Slothrop to himself.  Wanted to use his drugs,
> his mind probes, though it is hard to see what he is learning, if there is
> anything happening under his supervision beside the dredging up of painful,
> “dollful" and piteous cries. Is he purging pain or just recycling it?
>  Even here the slippery Slothrop finds a route of evasion, escapes the
> rapacious assault on his inner life by diving so deep into the subconscious
> there is little for Spectro to see but dingleberries and a crossword puzzle
> composed entirely of a single phrase.  This Kenosha Kid trope  is
> Foucaltian linguistics as the insurmountable barrier to perfect systems of
> control, to AI, to spying as a means to accurate information.  It’s  not
> just the monkey wrench in the system, it’s the shape shifting  monkey in
> the monkey wrech.
>
> If there really is a truth drug, would we want it?
>
>
>
>
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160521/f49c0102/attachment.html>