Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

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150 MAURICE CHARNEY Vealfoy. There is no way that this stellar cast could have failed to conjure up some pity and fear. 8 Edited by John Lahr as The Orton Diaries (New York: Harper and Row, 1986). 9 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thomson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson Learning, 2006). 10 Recently edited by Francesca Coppa, cited above.
Pynchon Takes the Fork in the Road *1 ROBERT E. KOHN Connotations Vol. 18.1-3 (2008/2009) “Even if you forget everything else,” Rinpungpa instructs the Yogi, “remember one thing—when you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Easy for him to say, of course, being two people at once. (Pynchon, Against the Day 766) The enigmatic seal, inscribed in Tibetan, on the dust jacket and final front-fly-page of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day can, with a stretch of the imagination, be interpreted as a caricature of the Tibetan yogi coming to the fork in the road to mythical Shambhala and then looking both ways. The actual quotation is that of the legendary baseball player and Mets manager, Yogi Berra, giving directions to his New Jersey home which was equally accessible along either of the two roads branching out from the fabled fork. This passage in the novel is not just a comic replay of Berra’s most famous remark, for “being two people at once” is a recurring theme in Against the Day. Pynchon traces the phenomenon back to “the mysterious shamanic power known as bilocation, which enables those with the gift literally to be in two or more places, often widely separated, at the same time” (Against 143). The Tibetan scholar W. Y. Evans-Wentz (152, 177, 178) records legends of Padmasambhava’s shamanic bilocational power to transform “himself into a pair of hawks,” into “Three Chief Teachers” or even into “Five Dhyani Buddhas” (see also Kohn, Ambivalence 110). The “memory we carry of having once moved at the speed and density of light,” Pynchon explains, makes us “once more able to pass * For debates inspired by this article, please check the Connotations website at .
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Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

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