Gnostic Pynchon

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Richard Romeo wrote:

> 2nd read of The Gnostic Pynchon--quite enjoyable.

"Still reading 'The magic Mountain,'" she said.
"Yes," I mumbled, half embarrassed.
"You'll have memorized it by now I guess, right?"
"No, just trying to get the leitmotiv is all," I said and glanced at my son
with a smile.
"Well, I don't get it, how can you read so many books over and over and read so
many damn books."
"He read that 'Man In Full' in a week, but he's reading Moby Dick since before
I was born," my son smiled back.
"It's like music I guess, I don't know for sure, like how someone might listen
and practice and play Mozart's Clarinet in A Major."
"Who do you play for. No one but us. We have to listen to you reciting Milton
and Shakepeare and that Pin CHon guy, and it's not as if your getting anything
for it."

The leitmotiv is the technique employed to preserve the inward unity and
abiding presentness of the whole at each moment...and thus seeks to abrogate
time itself by means of the technical device that attempt to give complete
presentness to any given moment to the entire world of ideas that it
comprises...its aim is always and consistently to BE that of which it speaks.

Mann, in fact, suggests that we should read the novel twice: "That is why I
make my presumptuous plea to my readers to read the book twice. Only so can one
really penetrate and enjoy its musical association of ideas. The first time,
the reader learns the thematic material; he is then in a position to read the
symbolic and allusive formulas both forwards and backwards."

The Gnostic Pynchon, Dwight Eddins, Cutters University Press, Bloomington and
Indianapolis (1990).

>From Chapter Five, Orphic contra Gnostic,  The Religious Dialectic of Gravity's
Rainbow

Eddin's claims that a "religious dialectic structures the novel."
111.2 It is marked by mystical and supernatural manifestations on both sides,
by the presence of fanatical devotees, and by a drive for nothing less than
metaphysical dominance. The stakes are for far more than physical or ethical
control; they represent finally the right to define ultimate reality and to
decide what the individual's relation to this reality is to be. Pynchon locates
at the heart of nature the mystical concept of a living, conscious Earth, from
which all blessings flow and to which Gravity recalls these dispensations in a
benevolent cycle of renewal. The religious response evoked by a full
realization of this phenomenon is a variety of Orpheism that leans heavily upon
the assumptions of Rainer maria Rilke's poetry in its identification with
natural process and its assimilation of life and death into a unifying lyric of
praise.

Eddins is a wild ride, beginning and ending (talk about reading backwards and
forwards)  with a quote from Harold Bloom, 'Pynchon is a Gnosis without
transcendence,' and offers, "but it is a gnosis haunted by the possibility
therof--both positively and negatively--and by a characteristically modernist
nostalgia for a quality of human consciousness that a logos beyond human agency
seems once to have empowered."

At times Eddins, like so many critics, is drawn so far afield of the subject at
hand that one questions his objectives and his objectivity.  His judicious use
of relative texts is impressive, but his impressive use of irrelevant texts is
disorientating. Is he making an argument for "the possibility thereof" or is he
providing a brilliant look into a brilliant mind? His tendency to debate other
critics is a pain in the ass and he often offers speculative balloons
untethered but to a text he can only assume Pynchon "must have read." In any
event, it should surprise no one here that my own reading of Pynchon involves a
Dialectical method and Comprehensive (logos) principles, and on these I am to
some extent in agreement with Eddins. However, I am convinced of Pynchon's
Objective perspective and the fourth cause of Pynchon's text (I have not
discussed here) the Noumenal reality. I will probably explain this approach in
host posts in October. In any event, these terms or "causes" are arbitrary,
though the nomenclature refers to and is drawn from historical paradigms
associated with classical Athenian philosophers and although the forms and
mixed forms transcend their historical models they are but a useful tool for a
comparative hermeneutic of the first principles of texts.

s~z wrote:
Here's a nice illustration of Terrance's point. (I think.) In this brief
passage, (especially if you read more before and aft what I quote below)
we bounce around vertically and horizontally from one character's
consciousness to another, from one sensory modality to another, from one
epistemology to another.....multiple images of things separate and
united......differentiated and integrating.....rug pulling
indeed.....and it's a magic carpet so falling is all the more
exhilarating....


(p. 30) "But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion.
The illusion of control. That A could do B. (ed., A never did) But that
was false. Completely. No one can DO. Things only happen, A and B are
unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable. . . ."
   "More Ouspenskian nonsense," whispers a lady brushing by on the arm
of a dock worker. Odors of Diesel fuel and Sous le Vent mingle as they
pass.

calbert at pop.tiac.net wrote:

> > In watching two strands--one about Poisson distributions, etc., one about
> > religion, I wonder whether it has struck anyone else to see
> > affinities--between predestination and statistical thinking.

Gentle now please, on the 4th of July I will no doubt be feeling like Jessica
once
again, when family members begin talking option pricing theory, Monte Carlo
simulation, Black and Scholes, Merton (not Thomas) and others. Now, I'm no
stochastic expert and a random walk to me is in the woods to suck the marrow
out of
life and not anything most wall street  gurus care to discuss, but I do
think that metaphors, scientific, and mathematical,  models and structures
applied poetically are quite beautiful and I love learning more about what
Pynchon is up to with these various theories and models. I thank you all for
your help in advance.

Here's how I read the statistical/predestination thing.

So we have control questions. An Eliot like seance, that introduces some major
themes to be explored and exposed later. Spin the wheel and we have the "word
to rip
apart the day" ---  " 'as it's always been in these affairs,' replies the
statistician
as if everyone knew: 'death.' "   We have the "secular wind." Does something
lie
beyond the secular? A Zen "Ho," perhaps, or an ego shattering word or
wind--pantheistic breath of all things? And we have control--"for the first
time it
was inside." Then the invisible hand and A and B and Ouspensky, Zipf, Watson
and Pavlov.

Now, we have Adam Smith's invisible hand and god's hand and that old can of
worms
and  Gurdjieff (Fripping Eno, where the hell is Richard Wilson to help here).
Anyway, this is, I guess, where divine providence and the markets share a hand
and
if god is dead, and the market is very much alive without his hand to turn the
wheel, well I suppose man and perhaps woman (yup, still an old boys club at the

white shoe firms, but some gals have broken the glass ceiling by god and
have seats now a days), have power. A power, born from the objectification
of the world, which is countered by the "Ouspenskian
nonsense," (Gurdjieff).

"Everything happens." And "nobody does anything and nobody can do anything."
-Ouspensky-

For control we must have order. And if we have order and control then we have
as
R&J say, "a great swamp of paranoia." Which brings us back to the ego, Lacan
style,
where the normal ego is paranoid. Next we get Zipf's Principle of Least Effort,

plotting the frequency, blabbing into her (Jess's and mine) bewilderment. And
all
these curves seem to demonstrate that Feldspath is paranoid. Meanwhile, we get
all
this political plotting and we are after all, in the shadow of the white
visitation, where paranoid Pavlovians and Behaviorists are randomly scattered
"here
and "there." Pavlovians and Behaviorists have this at least in common--to get
the
soul or consciousness out of the equation. Sounds like a problem that may lead
to
bondage or submission and dominance and anyway who can control the wind?

It seems that all of these models are on the receiving end of Pynchon's Cynical

Satire and we are asked to get the joke. The joke, it seems, is played out to
some
extent by R&J. "I'm in your power," she cries. "Utterly." But Jessica's not in
his
power (narrator). And "Jess don't make me out some cold fanatical man of
science..." Meanwhile Roger is described as a spider crawling in a  web of
numbers,
"and I don't know why Pointsman does anything he does, he's a Pavlovian, love."

Funny, funny, funny!

I think it's interesting to note how the narrative shifts from the Waste Land
like
voices of the seance to a rather straight forward omniscient narrative with
rolling
on the floor  comedy.

Terrance

"[it] portrays the fascination of the death idea, the triumph of drunken
disorder over the forces of life consecrated to rule and discipline."
                                                  -Mann- (as critic of his own
work)