The Recognitions and V.

[Mark Kohut]

There is Malta as a still-strong echoic embodiment of Adams' 
Middle Ages, the Virgin before the Dynamo.......

Adams Virgin is one of the major meanings of V....and his
world, lost to Pynchon, as to Gaddis, is a thematic foundation, I say.



----- Original Message ----
From: Richard Ryan <himself at richardryan.com>
To: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
Cc: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, June 12, 2011 2:05:42 PM
Subject: Re: The Recognitions and V.

While I would agree there's nothing in V to suggest a belief in a
prelapsarian paradise (as village culture, hunter gatherer societies,
whatever) - it also appears that Pynchon - at least the early Pynchon
- sees the centripetal forces of entropy and mechanization
*accelerating*; the depersonalizing, disintegrating aspects of human
history grow more and more ferocious as the powers of techno-violence
trend upwards - or downwards, as the case may be.

On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 1:04 PM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hm. Do ya think? I haven't read The Recognitions yet, but V. seems to
> me to suggest that it has always been a fragmented world. Pynchon
> represents history as an Ariadne's thread through an ongoing
> Armageddon in which individuals seek ever more tenuous connections as
> complexity becomes more evident. The unifying element is memory
> itself, rather than recollection of a better unity.
>
> On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 9:40 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Fragmentation and loss as the overarching meaning of the modern world. Both.
>> Belief that the world was once unified and that that was/is felt as a basic 
>>Good
>> Thing.
>>
>> (Of course, other books, writers, too, I'm sure. Who?)
>>
>
>
>
> --
> "Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
> creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
> trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
> of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
> than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant
>
>



-- 
Richard Ryan
New York and the World
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