Spoilers for V. & Moby-Dick

[Mark Kohut]

Great stuff.....thankee.....

On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 1:39 PM Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com> wrote:

> just a head's up if you haven't read these two books I am going to quote
> the last lines below so turn away now!
>
> I just finished reading V. for the nth time but the first time in probably
> 20 years, and it was rollicking fun & obscure mystery all the way through
> as expected. When I finally got to the end, the final lines gave me a real
> Moby-Dick frisson and looking at the two of them together (see / sea below)
> I understand why.
>
> Given the peacock tails / spouter whales poem much earlier on in the book,
> and the overall arch of Stencil's madly obsessive search for V. and
> answers, and the fact that Stencil like Ahab goes down with his ship, maybe
> there's more just the anxiety of influence at work.
>
> anyhoo, just a thought. If anyone knows of any critical work that looks at
> these two books together, do tell. (I know of some on Melville & TRP, but
> they are about Gravity's Rainbow, mainly, like this one
> <https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/24078356>).
>
> Moby-Dick (last lines, pre-epilogue):
>
> Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white
> surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud
> of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
>
> V (last lines):
>
> Draw a line from Malta to Lampedusa. Call it a radius. Somewhere in that
> circle, on the evening of the tenth, a waterspout appeared and lasted for
> fifteen minutes. Long enough to lift the xebec fifty feet, whirling, and
> creaking, Astarte's throat naked to the cloudless weather, and slam it down
> again into a piece of the Mediterranean whose subsequent surface phenomena
> - whitecaps, kelp islands, any of a million flatnesses which should catch
> thereafter part of the brute sun's spectrum – showed nothing at all of what
> came to lie beneath, that quiet June day.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>