V. (Ch 3) Impersonations and Dreams

[jbor]

Yes, I agree with you Paul. I don't think that even in _GR_ Pynchon 
discloses himself as a card-carrying, goat-sacrificing (or whatever . . . )
Gnostic. That "Kabbalist spokesman" Steve Edelman comes across as being a
little bit silly: It seems to me that it is "scholasticism" itself --
whether it be Edelman and "Rocket-state cosmology", "world-renowned analyst"
Mickey Wuxtry-Wuxtry, or Mitchell Prettyplace and his twelve volumes on
'King Kong' -- which is most heartily satirised; and I think the same goes
for a "scholarly quest" such as young Stencil's, who, if it *is* him
narrating, seems to be offering the comparison of himself to both Graves and
Frazer (61.5) as a type of self-aggrandizement. (As we shall discover, such
a comparison is quite ludicrous because Stencil achieves very little,
understands even less, and doesn't actually even seem to *want* to find
anything out). The sympathy for the Gnostics which can be discerned in _GR_
seems to me to be political in tenor rather than any all out embrace of a
particular belief system: as we well know, Pynchon tends to side with the
underdog, the persecuted, the passed over, and it is little doubt that the
Gnostics were (and still are) one of the more persecuted sects.
(Newly-arrived refugees from the Middle East, mainly Iraq, who I think call
themselves Mandaneans, are Gnostics, and have settled locally here. They
have been as badly treated in their homeland as the Kurdish were/are: denied
education, chased from their homes, tortured, murdered etc.)

But I'd say that Pynchon hadn't really read up on the Gnostics, or Kabbala,
Manicheans, Tarot, I Ching etc etc until after writing _V._ and _Lot49_. I
think Monroe is using small 'g' "gnostic" as a synonym for "secular", which
is trying to draw a rather long bow imo.

best

----------
>From: "Paul Mackin" <paul.mackin at verizon.net>
>To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: V. (Ch 3) Impersonations and Dreams
>Date: Fri, Dec 8, 2000, 1:31 AM
>

> Please excuse a poor nonreader of Eddins from treading into waters he knows
> not of, but is anyone saying that late Pynchon believes himself to be in
> possession of esoteric knowledge acquired through divine revelation of some
> sort??
>
> Well, no, of course not. But what then is gnosticism to him? Other than one
> more scheme of beliefs of the sort  mankind has cooked up down through the
> ages to explain the unexplainable and with which P can have fun sending up.
> Like occultism or behaviorism or organic chemistry?
>
> Would like to see what Eddins had to say but missed opportunity to buy the
> last copy at the local Borders.
>
> So am asking out of ignorace rather than flippancy.
>
>                      P.
>

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