Saure Trauben der Mathematik

[alice wellintown]

Pynchon has, as Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson,  the ability to take,
quickly, and make use of the works of others; he manages, as Cowart,
in his latest book admits, to get the critical reader reading,
searching, re-searching. So Cowart admits to reading a Santayana text
to discover what P may have understood from it and how P may have made
use of it.  This is, while absurd, not a complete waste, as Sanatayana
is a far better thinker and writer than P in many respects and, while
pragmatism, as discussed in several critical studies of P, may not be
all that significant in the fictional lives of P characters, it does
make it into the books. P is a theft; he robs from the rich and the
poor, puts things together, shores his fragments against our ruins.
The reader who attributes all that knowledge of, say math,  to P,  is
probably smarter than Pin math, but not as clever.  Authors can make
much of nothing much; it is their business to make, with magic, use of
shadows and smoke and mirrors and words. That is what makes a
Hawthorne or a Melville, or even an Emerson, who in the end, is more a
n author of fictions, than we may be willing to accept. Pynchon has to
fool us. But we are not fools. We  are, as Prospero reminds us,
Shakespearean jesters too. We play the play and the play is the thing.