A Reviewer's Hunch--Wings of Desire--Rilke's Angels--Angels of Lubeck

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Keith:
Adept?  How so?

On May 27, 2007, at 5:23 PM, robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:

It hardly matters whether or not Pynchon "believes" in Angels, he's
always working with them in his novels---that's not the recreation
of an amature, these are the workings of an adept, take it from  
there. . . .

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That's worthy of a real answer, too bad I don't have one right of this 
moment. But there is the tone that's adopted so often, the tone of the adept,
and there is the depth of knowledge (or at least of reference, which is pretty
much the same thing). The simple fact that he leans on the subject so much 
points to an unusual degree of interest, as does the specificity of the language 
he uses. I always though of this passage as a pointer:

          . . . . (after you get a little time in---whatever 
          that means over here---one of these archetypes gets 
          to look pretty much like any other, oh you hear some 
          of these new hires, the seersucker crowd come in the 
          first day, "wow! Hey---that's th-th' Tree o' Creation! 
          Huh? Ain't it! Jeepers!" but they calm down fast 
          enough, pick up the reflexes for Intent to Gawk, you 
          know self-criticism's an amazing technique, it shouldn't 
          work but it does. . . .

Gravity's Rainbow, V. 411 or P. 417

And then there's the introduction to Jim Dodge's "Stone Junction". 
Perhaps it's affect, tone of voice, choice of words, perhaps it's that 
Masonic handshake, but Pynchon does spend an awful lot of time creating
scenes of a particular stripe with particular voices to be heard within those 
scenes.