re. Tarot and Gaddis?

[Mark Kohut]

So, already, we can be reminded that one of the few times
Pynchon was led to write a non-fiction piece was when he
wrote about one of the Seven Deadly Sins: Sloth

And, a major part of TRP is a search for the (original) Word. 



----- Original Message ----
From: Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com>
To: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, March 23, 2011 2:54:06 PM
Subject: Re: re. Tarot and Gaddis?

Alchemy is very relevant to "The Recognitions." So is financial
alchemy, of a sort, to _J R_.

But no, Gaddis doesn't use the Tarot in the way Pynchon does.

While TR is heavily larded with symbols, I tend to think much of it is
bunkum, this idea of shoring fragments against the ruin, and much less
weighted with any real meaning than the various manipulators of said
symbols would have it.

A key image in TR is the table with the Seven Sins on it, by
Hieronymus Bosch. (see more here:
http://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/sevensinspainting.shtml).

Obviously heavily symbolic, and all the sins are visited at length in
the book; but the key question about the table thematically is whether
it is a copy of the original or not, rather than the symbolic message
of the image itself.

etb




On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 2:25 PM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> On 23.03.2011 00:08, Erik T. Burns wrote:
>
>
> Finally, there's a Paris Review interview with William Gaddis from
>1986: 
>http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2577/the-art-of-fiction-no-101-william-gaddis
> --
>-
> "What’s any artist but the dregs of his work: I gave that line to Wyatt
> thirty-odd years ago and as far as I’m concerned it’s still valid."
>
>
> In this interview it becomes obvious that Alchemy is relevant to "The
> Recognitions", which was
> published in 1955. So, when Gaddis is corresponding on the Tarot in 1963,
> this seems to indicate
> an ongoing interest in the Hermetic Arts. My next question: Did Gaddis, in
> later books (or already
> in "The Recognitions"), write about the Tarot in a way that could be
> compared to the way Pynchon
> is writing about it in "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Against the Day"?
>
> Kai
>
>
>