Description
"The Tower, the City, the Sewers: Art, Death, and Memory in Yeats and Pynchon"In W. B. Yeats’s Per Amica Silentia Lunae, he speaks of a store of images called the Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World, which is a site of shared memory. He suggests that at the time of death, we will return to the Anima Mundi and our memories will blend with those already there; we “carry to Anima Mundi our memory, and that memory is for a time our external world.” This paper explores the concept of the Anima Mundi and of dead and living memories through Thomas Pynchon’s V., particularly the chapter “Confessions of Fausto Maijstral,” set in Malta between the years 1937 and 1943. It will be argued that in the course of this chapter, which draws closely on two poems by Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Among School Children,” as well as Per Amica Silentia Lunae, Pynchon uses the destruction of the Maltese city of Valletta firstly to both represent and criticise the artifice of Yeats’s Byzantium, where life is abstracted into the fixed forms of art, and, secondly, to recast Yeats’s Soul of the World, a storehouse of images, as an intertextual realm open to and changing with the demands and experiences of the present. In the play of his child-poets, who move between life and death, aboveground and underground, Pynchon reveals an artistic practice not bound to or limited by the memories of the past, but actively producing our memories of the future.
| Period | 2003 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Lisbon, PortugalShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- Thomas Pynchon
- W. B. Yeats
- Intertextuality