Woge, Thanatoids and Spirits

[Paul Mackin]

David H asks (concerning the spirits and ghosts hauting VL):

> wonder what comments anyone
> else has.
 
I'll cut straight to the chase and say that IMHO the appearance of
magic in VL (as in the other books) is merely decorative. The only
magic that Pynchon believes in (really really believes in) is the
MAGIC OF WORDS.

A book review of _Stange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian
Consciousness_ in Sunday's NY Times opened as follows:

     D o you believe in fairies? I don't know about you, but I am not
     prepared to give that question the time of day. If it's a matter of
     saving Tinker Bell in the play, I'll clap; but a scholarly book,
     equipped with citations, up-to-the-minute jargon and a thesis to
     ride ought to spare us. Carole G. Silver's ''Strange and Secret
     Peoples'' does not, it is true, insist that we ourselves hold what
     she calls ''the fairy-faith''; but it wants us to believe that this
     faith gripped the Victorians, or most of them, and not just
     fisherfolk and crackpot rural antiquarians either.
     
     We are expected to embrace the proposition that the revival of
     fairy lore during the 19th century was not simply decorative, but a
     haunting of the imagination and spirit of the time that drained
     large measures of the nation's capacity to ''believe.'' The
     Victorians were not just charmed or fascinated or willing to put up
     with elf dogma; they swallowed it whole, most of them. Silver wants
     us to believe they believed. (and so forth)

Well, you get the point. The reviewer, James R. Kincaid, and I are driven
slightly nuts by certain avenues of inquiry. 

Merely my opinion and what do I know.

			P.