Reading the Value System of Gravity's Rainbow ...

[Dave Monroe]

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 8:28 PM, Mark Kohut<markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> That giant "eyeball of society" phrase and image early in AtD, as they watch the photographer chase the scantily-clad woman--instead of doing it
> with her naturally in the nature they are running in----is AN EXACT QUOTE
> from Emerson's "Nature."

>From Deborah L. Madsen, "Pynchon's Quest Narratives and the Tradition
of American Romance," Approaches to Teaching Pynchon's The Crying of
Lot 49 and Other Works, ed. Thomas H, Schaub (NY: MLA, 2008), pp.
25-30:

   "Emerson's essay 'Nature' provides a useful encapsulation of the
Romanticv themes taht inform the genre of American romance narrative
and the quest for meaning.  The idea of nature as a symbolic text to
be read, the transcendent emaning of which is the ''living Unity' of
the world, provides the foundation for Emerson's theory of
'correspondences.'  In 'Nature,' Emerson explains how individual
subjectivity facilitates this unification through the interpretation
of words as the signs of natural facts, which mediate between the
human and natural worlds to represent a unified web of creation....
In Symbolism and American Literature (953), [Charles] Feidelson argues
that teh puritan reflex to read teh landscape as a symbolic text of
spirit was inherite by teh Romanticv writers of teh American
nineteenth century.... New England, not as a commercial enterprise but
as a symbolic expression of 'God's thought' ..." (p. 27)

http://www.mla.org/store/CID23/PID336

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature" (1836)

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/nature.html
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/emerson/nature-contents.html
http://www.bartleby.com/5/114.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_(essay)

Feidelson, Charles, Jr.  Symbolism and American Literature.
   Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1959 [1953].

http://www.jstor.org/pss/3031441
http://www.henry-miller.com/narrative-literature/charles-feidelson-symbolism-and-american-literature.html

> And, in "the Machine in the Garden:, Leo Marx quotes from Thoreau on his beloved nature ..pierced by the awful train whistle....
> A--and we know what TRP thinks of trains in AtD......

http://anthologyoi.com/writings/books/literature/literature-thoreaus-consideration-of-the-railroad-is-a-blessing-a-curse-and-a-symbol.html
http://www.kenkifer.com/Thoreau/sounds.htm

Marx, Leo.  The Machine in the Garden:
   Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America.
   New York: Oxford UP, 1964.

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/?cp=24297&view=usa&ci=019513351X
http://books.google.com/books?id=aJ3SfJyseSoC

Another, if not must-, SHOULD-read here, at any rate.  Thanks, Mark!