V. (Ch 3) Impersonations and Dreams

[Terrance]

Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> Seems to me that "sympathy for the Gnostics" may be a good way of putting it.
> Sympathy for the down and out. Not that Gnostics were always
> down-and-outers--although the Australian example does help bolster the
> genraliziation.  Also, would  not a prime motivation or appeal for the Gnostic
> position have lain in quite an utter disenchantment with the material world. A
> view that poverty and disease and starvation most assuredly work  to instill. The
> material world is unquestionably  unfair. If this can be seen as a mistake in
> creation then the hope is reasonable that some correction can yet take place.
> The truth and the light may yet somehow prevail.
> 
> Does Pynchon entertain this hope? And in what sense?
> 
>                     P.

When we get to Father Fairing we will no doubt have more to
discuss on this, what sounds like gnostic Marxism, or
Christian Marxism, but Neoplatonic for sure,  but if you are
suggesting that the Gnostic's utter disenchantment with the
material world, the Neoplatonic disdain for the Earth,
Gnostic cosmogony, is in some way positive in TRP's fiction,
that he is sympathetic to this view, I should love to hear
more. I find he is just the opposite. 


As regards truth and light, my guess is no, as to material
fairness, again my guess is no, but I don't think Pynchon a
nihilist or an existentialist stoic, or a neoplatonist, or a
Marxist, or a gnostic either. I think he is very much the
American son of Melville, he is a quester, a satirist, black
with the miserable truth, Ah Humanity!