The Recognitions and V.

[Mark Kohut]

Pynchon took the complaining neurotic Adams quite seriously.

Adams' amateurism is one reason he may have liked him. 
Pynchon hunted mythic ideas not empirical ones. 

See the very recent A Secular Age for a philosopher's 
presentation of the lost unity of the Middle Ages....

See Kermode's late book on Shakespeare for his
presentation of another current historian's take...
book called something like The Shattering of the Altars, 1400---1600.




 


----- Original Message ----
From: Richard Ryan <himself at richardryan.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
Cc: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, June 12, 2011 3:40:20 PM
Subject: Re: The Recognitions and V.

I agree with your cross-connect from Pynchon's V to Adams's
spiritually robust vision of the Middle Ages, Mark.  But I'd also put
in that the few serious medievalists I've asked about Adams's "Mont
Saint Michel and Chartres" regard it as an entertaining goof by a
talented amateur.  I'd bet Pynchon is enough of an empiricist not to
take Adam's hookah-pipe dream of the European 12th-13th centuries
seriously as anything other than a late romantic vision of an
imaginary social order that never existed.



On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 3:14 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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
> ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
> Thanks to all who saw VTM's new production!
> "Brilliant!";"Superb!" - NYTheatre-wire.com
> www.kingstheplay.com
>
>
>



-- 
Richard Ryan
New York and the World
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Thanks to all who saw VTM's new production!
"Brilliant!";"Superb!" - NYTheatre-wire.com
www.kingstheplay.com