GRGR (2) "great bright hand"

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Doug Millison wrote:

> I don't know. TRP brings in all sorts of arcana -- we've already
> encountered the allusion to the I Ching ("Youthful Folly" wasn't it), but
> it doesn't seem as fundamental, to me at least, as the Puritan theology. Do
> you see a significant Daoist element in GR?
>

How can one argue that Puritan theology is more fundamental? Because it's alluded
to more often? Or informs the reader or the characters or even the author? Is it
the names? What's in a name? In Pynchon a name, for example,  "Gravity" or
"Rainbow" is part of a pair of opposites. References are situated  within a binary
set: Apocalypse and Pentecost or if you prefer, the DNA chain twisting now towards
epistemological reference and now away or Newtonian Death and Noah's Rainbow or
New Physics and Old Physics and all those blacks and whites flipping and flopping
and switching and changing.  A binary reading of Pynchon, some would claim, is a
trap set by the aothor.

I don't agree! A trap is not consistent with Pynchon's form of dialectic.  Not a
trap, but the general confusion generated by specific, varying systems, for
organizing and making sense of experience. A crisis in which paradigms of
understanding melt and mix and conflicting evidence, some powerful and
insignificant, some weak and essential, coming from east and west and mixed modes
of knowing, pull the epistemological rug out from under our minds and send us
reeling like Dorothy and Toto through the looking glass. Pynchon is not concerned
with a particular polarity or opposition. His method is dialectical, and  like
Anaximander, where the source of coming to-be for existing things is that into
which destruction, too happens, "according to necessity; for they pay penalty and
retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of
time." Although the dialectical relationship of the Old and New Testament in which
Jesus destroys and transforms and the agon is not sustained, as it is in the
Koran, for example or to take one example from Taoism, Lao Tzu, a dialectically
minded Taoist, envisions the harmonious interaction of yin and yang and not the
Yo-Yo. Care is what Pynchon advocates and it is a state of Grace, if you will, a
comprehensive principle, not unlike the Trinity or yin and yang, and I think
Anaximander is even better or Tolstoy, where we find the other aspect of Pynchon's
transcendence not through "saturation," but through an incomprehensible
comprehensive:

from War and Peace

As the sun and each atom of ether is a sphere complete in itself, and yet at the
same time only a part of a whole too immense for man to comprehend, so each
individual has within himself his own aims and yet has them to serve a general
purpose incomprehensible to man.


Terrance