AtD: Lew's experience of grace

[Mark Kohut]

I think Lew's experience is the deepest, most overarching thematic meaning of 
the novel...Pynchon
making the personal, societal, historical in the most enveloping 
way..............Lew's Grace is
.............P's 'religious redefinition' in my argumentative 
opinion....................

...I posted the 'grace' connections
on the ATD wiki...................................


----- Original Message ----
From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, December 1, 2010 7:40:00 AM
Subject: AtD: Lew's experience of grace

We know the novel ends with the word "grace", thereby giving it, the word, a 
special meaning.
All theological discussions aside for the moment, let me ask how "grace" is 
defined inside the
novel itself. I do so, because very early on, as I now realize during my regular 
re-read, an
important character, Lew Basnight, has his personal experience of "grace" which 
is, if I
didn't miss anything, the first concept of the term the novel has to offer us.

"One mild and ordinary work-morning in Chicago, Lew happened to find himself on 
a public
conveyance, head and eyes inclined nowhere in particular ["soft eyes", as they 
call it in The
Wire.kfl], when he entered, all too briefly, a condition he had no memory of 
having sought
[As A.C. has it: "Don't lust after results!".kfl], which he later came to think 
of as grace. (...)
Lew found himself surrounded by a luminosity new to him, not even observed in 
dreams,
nor easily attributed to the smoke-inflected sun beginning to light Chicago." 
(p. 42)

How representative is Lew's experience for AtD's overall concept of "grace"?

Kai