parrots in Pynchon

[Robin Landseadel]

On Feb 25, 2009, at 10:09 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> Pynchon must love the trickster figure......

. . . .like, say, the Fool Card? O-O-Or meebee the Joker?

	. . .He takes the Diamond, and then the Diamond takes him. For
	it turns out to be a gateway to elsewhere, and Daniel's life's tale
	an account of the incarnation of a god, not the usual sort that
	ends up bringing aid and comfort to earthly powers, but that
	favorite of writers, the incorruptible wiseguy known to
	anthropologists as the Trickster, to working alchemists as
	Hermes, to card-players everywhere as the Joker. We don't
	learn this till the end of the story, by which point, knowing
	Daniel as we've come to, we are free to take it literally as a real
	transfiguration, or as a metaphor of spiritual enlightenment, or
	as a description of Daniel's unusually exalted state of mind as
	he prepares to cross, forever, the stone junction between Above
	and Below -- by this point, all of these possibilities have
	become equally true, for we have been along on one of those
	indispensable literary journeys, taken nearly as far as Daniel --
	through it is for him to slip along across the last borderline, into
	what Wittgenstein once supposed cannot be spoken of, and
	upon which, as Eliphaz Levi advised us -- after "To know, to will,
	to dare" as the last and greatest of the rules of Magic -- we must
	keep silent.
	Thomas Pynchon, Introduction to Stone Junction