Chasing ... Cutting

[Terrance Flaherty]

Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> Have the Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow: Modern Critical Interpretations,
> ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986) at hand, but no Charles
> Berger--is there a Thomas Pynchon: Modern Critical Views instead that I've
> missed in the confusion?  Apparently ... and did I read your response right,
> that you have an essay within?  Will find ...

I don't have the book now, but I have a copy of the essay
here. This is the book, I think. 


 Title:          Thomas Pynchon / edited with and
introduction by Harold Bloom.

 Published:      New York : Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.

 Description:    232 p. 

 
 Notes:          Includes index.
                 Bibliography: p. 221-222.

 Here is what Berger says on page 212:

I think we can read in Slothrp's demise the danger of taking
all that instruction, all those portents unaided; and in
this danger might be the motive for Merril's invention or
discovery of the Instructor. All the classic romance
fictions provide a guide for the hero, and Merrill's trilogy
continues this tradition with a vengeance. He is as guided
as any quester since Dante. Even Oedipa Maas had her
precursors along the way to aid her. But much of the
darkness permeating Gravity's Rainbow comes from the absence
of any such sponsoring guides. The novel abounds in messages
that must be deciphered in the absence of any guiding
ideology, much less any figure of instruction. 

"Traditional exegetical pastimes" and "CLT" may guide us out
of the darkness of Pirate's dream, but they can go no
further. Perhaps it is only some Beatrice, some medieval
doctrines of light and love which function as beauty and
love which beauty elicits that may guide us in
Platonic-erotic flight out of the darkness on the wings of
Pynchon's poetics? 

Sorry, so sorry, didn't mean to offend anyone's *reading* of
Moby-Dick. ;-)