re. Tarot and Gaddis?

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Maybe Gaddis asked Candida Donadio about Tarot card reading for, well, 
personal reasons?

Still wondering about the letter ...

KFL

On 23.03.2011 19:54, Erik T. Burns wrote:

> 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
>>
>>
>>
>