The Forty-Nine Steps

[Dave Monroe]

This reminds me, just flipped through ...

Calasso, Roberto.  The Forty-Nine Steps.
   Trans. John Shepley.  Minneapolis:
   U of Minnesota P, 2001.

>From the back cover ...

"'Forty-nine steps' refers to the Talmudic doctrine
that there are forty-nine steps to meaning in every
passage of the Torah. Employing this interpretive
approach, Calasso offers a "secret history" of
European literature and philosophy in the wake of
Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Calasso analyzes how
figures ranging from Gustav Flaubert, Gottfried Benn,
Karl Kraus, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Franz
Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, and Theodor Adorno have
contributed to, or been                emblematic of,
the current state of Western thought.  The book's
theme, writ large, is the power of fable-specifically,
its persistence in art and literature despite its
exclusion from orthodox philosophy."

http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/C/calasso_forty-nine.html

No Pynchon mentions so far, but I may yet post from
the  very interesting indeed chapter on Walter
Benjamin (kaballah, allegory, the Baroque, et al.). 
Was just easier to post from the publisher's blurb, is
all ...


--- lorentzen-nicklaus
<lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de> wrote:
> in kabbalist numerology one does add up again and
> again, taking the total of the digits, to find out
> the most relevant sphere.

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