The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon by William M. Plater (review)

110Reviews vestigating the revisions ofAs I Lay Dying and Light in August to determine whether they have a similar bearing on the Earth-mother theme. In the study as a whole, he says that he has chosen the works which he finds to be archetypal on the basis of their mythic vitality rather than on the grounds of literary excellence. Yet he rejects Pylon and The Wild Palms from consideration by employing purely esthetic criteria, preferring, as he says, "to let inferior work lie" (p. xvi). He makes assumptions about Faulkner's personal relation to the myth of the matriarchal without attempting to anchor these in the events of Faulkner's life. The index to the work is not a servicable one, forcing greater attention to the chapter notes. Inspection of the notes reveals, astonishingly, almost no references by Williams to Faulkner scholarship or to myth criticism which has been published since 1969. Sally R. Page's Faulkner's Women: Characterization and Meaning (1972) is one of the few books published since 1970 which he does cite. Page's volume seems chiefly to have supplied him with the hint that a book bearing the title Faulkner's Women might succeed in catching the eye. Sally Page's book is a comprehensive, conscientious study of Faulkner's women characters, whereas Faulkner's Women: The Myth and the Muse exploits die interest which the woman's movement has aroused without in turn repaying it to an appreciable degree. By comparison to John T. Irwin's Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (1975), which also attempts to illuminate Faulkner through data from a related field, we find that Irwin manages to be both engaging and authoritative, and even when we disagree, while Williams is neither, even when we agree. There is much on the subject of Faulkner and myth which still needs to be explored. This volume, unfortunately, does not establish the small advances it makes on firm ground. New York UniversityUse Dusoir Lind Plater, William M. The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon . Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1978. 268 pp. Cloth: $12.50. "The grim phoenix," Leni Polker's metaphor for the contemporary life force, "creates its own holocaust . . . deliberate resurrection. Staged. Under control. No grace, no interventions by God." Restrained, calculating, bent on death, the grim phoenix neither depends upon nor opens the way toward anything beyond its own destructive cycle. It is even more terrifying than Yeats's rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. And William Plater seizes upon the grim phoenix as the controlling metaphor for his study of Thomas Pynchon, showing his world to be a closed system, governed by forces that transform life into death, culminating not in resurrection, as it has been religiously conceived , but in death transfigured. While "the grim phoenix" is a compelling metaphor, what illuminates Plater's central and original thesis is Kekule's dream of die Great Serpent swallowing its own tail. For it was Kekule's dream that led him to discover die shape of the benzene ring, which formed the basis for synthetic chemistry and the synthetic industry. Kekule's Serpent achieved the ultimate form of consumption; the Serpent's dream became the ultimate form of Western power. The creation of synthetics is the process of transforming natural into artificial products , or life into death. And the process is reflected in the multinational industries—from Studies in American Fiction111 I.G. Farben to Yoyodyne—tiiat cross boundaries of geography and the imagination while subsuming competition and individual differences, creates new markets while absorbing old ones, uses war to consolidate its own power, stimulates appetites for its own nourishment , and consumes every kind of natural energy for its own sustenance. As Plater points out, Kekule did not dream of the mythological Serpent that perpetually transforms death into life. Rather, in Pynchon's words, it was "a dreaming Serpent that surrounds the World. The Serpent that announces, 'The World is a closed thing, cynical, resonant, eternally returning,' is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that 'productivity' and 'earnings' keey on increasing witii...