GRGR(3) Pointsman (also Re. Gnostic Pynchon)

[David Morris]

Rich R. Wrote:
>To use a phrase Dwight Eddins in the Gnostic Pynchon uses,
>Slothrop could represent the apeironic-wing of gnosticism,
>that strain of anti-paranoia, existentialism, where nothing
>is connected nothing.

This list contiually forces me to go to the dictionary, as well as other
sources, to try to follow along, but WTF (What the Fuck) is "apeironic"?
Not in any dictionary I've got.  "Irony," I unnerstand, sorta.  "Ape?"
Prefix, meaning?


Terrance F. Flaherty:
>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."

Wow!  This sounds like a must-read.  Eddins sounds like my kinda guy.