Against the Day

Thu Aug 29 01:29:24 CDT 2019

For that matter, V. for Victory could map to the goddess Nike, and V. the novel about the costs and prospects accruing from victory in WWII

With Paola’s Miraculous Medal mapping to Tiphareth, mutatis mutandis as Dr Benway used to say
---------- Original Message ----------
From: "peterthooper at juno.com" <peterthooper at juno.com>
To: Pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: Against the Day
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2019 06:24:40 GMT

Just the type of juicy post one longs for in these Dog Days!

On Eigenvalue, isn’t it like mapping a point from one space onto another space?

Like he’s a dentist but his role for the narrative in V. is that of the confessor.

I mean, you’ve got the “keeping your teeth” mindset in which you comply with your role as patient, allowing access to a private space, maybe sedation, and payment...where the person works to make your appendages conform as far as may be to an ideal, and even assigns a homework routine with brushing and flossing and watery dentifrices —-

Which maps onto an older paradigm of wanting to keep your soul, opening up your private thoughts and deeds, submitting to judgement and correction according to a rubric, donations, sedation - Marx called religion itself an opiate, but perhaps there’s other considerations (it just seems so facile and dismissive so I want a better tenor for the metaphor - maybe absolution itself is the sedative in the scenario, more particular - but maybe not, dentists give you the sedative before the work starts, right? so maybe just whatever it is the priest says at the outset...I mean, this routine was important to Mr Pynchon at least in his extreme youth so I don’t think he was just tossing out the comparison - just like his puns, he probably edits out hundreds before he gets just the right one) and the homework being prayer and sometimes they also assign penances and/or amends.

Anyway, that mapping into a different space is I think a key of sorts, and I think it recurs -

 in life, every time the situation changes, you have your set of points from the previous space now functioning under new rules that you have to learn or not, but probably should...

But also in the books - like going to the dentist with a devout expectation of saving your holy molars, so to speak (like an early John Updike story features a dental epiphany)(Ploy’s penance was particularly severe!)

Or a DEA agent looking like a Japanese karmic adjuster, or Benny Profane enacting a hero’s journey even as a sea slug of sorts, and Stencil’s trying to understand an obscure note of his father’s casting an analytical eye on history - or all the earthbound AtDers coping with change (mostly miserably) and the Chums too (more successful but not without agony) and of course Slothrop - mapping a hero’s journey, Orpheus losing his harp but again finding it, and all the different signifying fields in which he means different things... but the suggestion is that his identity with Orpheus is meaningful, Orpheus being the offspring of Calliope - the muse of history, so very pertinent - and some dude I never heard of, Oeagrus, which is a lot of vowels, but, like “team,” has no “i” in it, possibly a wine god (there extand a thousand and one stories, all told)
-  but that’s the overarching narrative of GR, imho, mapping mindless pleasure odyssey onto an historic, wine-dark mythos -

With a soupçon of life being a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think, but we all do both, so there’s an eigenvalue in each space for all kinds of development, wouldn’t you say? I’d bet money, if I did that sort of thing, that someone who knew more about Eigenvalues could do a lot more with the idea.

---------- Original Message ----------
From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
To: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
Cc: “pynchon-l at waste.org“ <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Re: Against the Day
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2019 10:34:03 -0400

But AtD doesnt seem that different from the vision of history as depicted
in V/GR and M&D--I see it as one big continuum from the slave/mercantile
fetishes of the 18th century to the early years of the power of the nation
state to its logical end game in nuclear annihilation and/or control, BE
being a more easily digested post-script.
For me, Pynchon's voice is what keeps me reading him.

rich

On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 7:18 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> It is just as much the great overarching vision of history and that
> perspective on the characters
> that makes this a great novel.
>
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 12:08 PM rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> something tells me that the whole point of it all is the side-view, the
>> long-ish asides and explications on quite a range of different matters and
>> lightings (literally). the characters aren't important, it's the voice,
>> reader.
>> do we care so much for Webb? even the union doesnt show up for his
>> funeral.
>> Or Reef's sexual exploits or the wondrous fashions that Dally or Yashmeen
>> inhabit? or why apparently a converted Christer Foley kills Scarsdale
>> Vibe?
>> Or the long and tortuous travels through  Mexico or the Balkans or East
>> Asia, filled with terrain hardships and every type of liquer known to man.
>> It all becomes a blur and even in the latter parts of the Against the Day
>> section, one could detect a weariness even from the author, filled with
>> earnest hombres and spunky cowgirls and showtunes. So, let's make things
>> easier and tie things up--the Chums meet their girl Chums and Deuce
>> Kindred
>> and Lake Traverse remain terrible people and not very interesting even in
>> post-war LA where even  the used and past-life who know who contritions of
>> Lew leads to a lazy rape and a lazy section.
>> I could go on. Erect penises and anarchist all around! snore
>> But to reiterate, its those side jaunts where nothing happens but the
>> important work is done. That, to me, is the joy of the book. I even picked
>> up the Vintage UK version (200 and some odd pages more of that voice
>> Pynchon from the original. ha!).
>> The funny thing is I could've sworn to a number of things that happened in
>> the book that I remembered, that on this re-read never happened at all. it
>> was as if time was the only real measure, the other axis we know and love
>> and touch were not. go figure.
>> So you can count of many fingers and dimensions the many doublings,
>> couplings and symmetrics as you can find and it will take many an hour to
>> detect them all. I'll leave that to the critics.
>> I still dont know what an eigenvalue is and I probably never will
>>
>> rich
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>
--
Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
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