The Wrecked Read. Chap 1 simple summary

[David Morris]

In the first chapter the imitating/reusing of magic into mysticism
into religion is portrayed as a downward trend, losing petency with
each round.

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 3:43 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> We don't want to forget the biggest binary opposition of them all. Namely,
> is counterfeiting in the sense of copying, imitating, reusing necessarily a
> good thing or a bad thing?
>
> Discussions of Gaddis always involves Frazer's points  about the newer
> religion's having some basis in the older ones and how this insight
> influenced the novel.  This didn't particularly upset Frazer.  Did it in
> some way Gaddis.  I'm sure in the novel there are instances of both good and
> bad "counterfeiting."  I'm totally rusty on where they occur but . . .
>  something to watch out for.
>
> Put another way, I can't imaging Gaddis' view of Christianity being
> radically altered by discovering that Attis and Jesus died and were
> resurrected the same time of year.
>
>
>> I might argue that Catholic/Protestant are horses of a barely different
>> color,
>> despite appearances so far,
>>
>> And plumbing this 'higher reality'...this narrator's pov that might ground
>> the
>> savage
>> satire in its moral vision against which the satire is set...............
>>
>> will be very interesting too................
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----
>> From: Richard Ryan<himself at richardryan.com>
>> To: Mark Kohut<markekohut at yahoo.com>
>> Cc: pynchon -l<pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Mon, April 18, 2011 5:58:10 PM
>> Subject: Re: The Wrecked Read. Chap 1 simple summary
>>
>> Only a hundred pages in... but my thought is that The Recognitions
>> continually sets forth a set of binary oppositions (fake-real;
>> Catholic-Protestant; Christian-Pagan; Old World-New World;.....) which
>> give the book its conceptual structure.  The plot is advanced - and
>> the characters are draw into the progress of the plot - by a series of
>> stop-time moments and incomplete encounters in which they experience
>> some echo of the "higher reality" that encompasses them. So the book's
>> over-arching framework is a complex of dialectical antagonisms, while
>> the more localized and limited reality of the characters' psyches are
>> exposed to us, the readers, in epiphanic bursts that the narrator
>> allows us to share with his dramatis personae.
>>
>> What we share, on the other hand, with the narrator (and presumably
>> with Gaddis) is the wider, more self-conscious registry of the social
>> or aesthetic tensions that make up the characters' fictive world. We
>> are both inside and outside the matrix that the characters experience
>> as a series of disquieting, symbolically charged tableaux.  These are
>> the Recognitions of the title (which would allow for any number of the
>> Repetitions you rightly detect, Mark....)
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 9:02 AM, Mark Kohut<markekohut at yahoo.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> Chap 1 introduces many key characters and also provides a
>>> kind of stakes-raising very ambitious metaphor as backstory, as history:
>>> America
>>> is/was
>>> a guilt-ridden Puritanical House of Seven Gables kind of country.
>>>
>>> Which Rev Gwyon sees anthropologically and the narrator sees in the whole
>>> revelatory tradition of such that The Golden Bough intorduced.
>>>
>>> It all goes way back is repeated.
>>>
>>> Young Wyatt almost dies but becomes an artist; an artist who gives up
>>> doing
>>> original
>>> works in order to make a living doing near-perfect forgeries--imitations
>>> of
>>> earlier great artists.
>>>
>>>
>>> America is a country that lives fraudulently, perhaps the metaphor goes?
>>>
>>> Time, living in real time, is a positive herein, perhaps echoing Eliot's
>>> returning "recognizing
>>> the place for the first time".......
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>