pynchon in American Gods; American Gods in me

[Monte Davis]

JT> how myths change and stay the same.  How we carry them and they carry
us. how myths change and stay the same.  How we carry them and they carry
us.

I like your characterization of AG, and especially this: not a bad capsule
characterization of Joseph Campbell, incidentally.

Track down a copy of Alan Garner's The Owl Service (1967,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Owl_Service), in which three English and
Welsh teenagers reenact (as their parents did) a triangle from the
Mabinogion. The book is nominally "young adult" -- sure, so are Huckleberry
Finn and Animal Farm and Romeo and Juliet. Short, pared-down, more dialogue
than exposition or description. Ambiguity as intense and central as that in
The Turn of the Screw: almost everything that happens could be magic and
undead 800-year-old spirits, or could just as well be stressed-out,
fantasizing/hallucinating kids behaving in ways unconsciously learned from
their parents. Explain it with archetypes, or just admit it: a myth is
living them.

If something more "adult" and "sophisticated" and "realist" (heh) is
required, Robertson Davies' splendid Deptford trilogy
(http://www.amazon.com/Deptford-Trilogy-Robertson-Davies/dp/0140147551)
covers a lot of the same ground, with explicitly Jungian gloss built in.

 Ovid's Metamorphoses is the prime wellspring. There's a reason it's been
the source -- direct or indirect -- for more Western literature and art than
any other single classical work. Ovid knew that we can't help encountering
(and being) Narcissus, Eurydice, Midas, Medea, Icarus, Arachne and the rest
at transformative moments throughout our lives. Slothrop glimpsing Katje's
"terrible Face That Is no Face", a goddess' mask..? Roger realizing that for
postwar Jessica he will be "a mistake thank God she didn't make"..? Pure
Actaeon and Diana.      
   

 -----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Joseph Tracy
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 1:19 PM
To: P-list List
Subject: pynchon in American Gods; American Gods in me

This scene takes place after the main character has died  after 9 days tied
to the world ash ( in honor of the murdered Odin)and is doing a review of
his past while entering the underworld. He is remembering his mother's death
bed and seeing himself reading a book by her bedside.

"Shadow wondered what the book was, and he walked around the hospital bed to
inspect it more closely. He stood between the bed and the chair looking from
the one to the other, the big boy hunched into his chair, his nose buried in
Gravity's Rainbow, trying to escape from his mother's death into London
during the blitz, the fictional madness of the book no escape and no
excuse."

Gaiman, Neil (2011-06-21). American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition: A
Novel (p. 421). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

Gaiman's prose is a storyteller's. He doesn't do long complex sentences or
formal experimentation. But he knows what he is about and American Gods is
rather like doing a vicarious back flip off the high dive into shallow water
and missing the concrete because shallow can get pretty deep, surprising and
exhilarating. I'm finding it enjoyable both as escape and as a consideration
of how myths change and stay the same.  How we carry them and they carry us.

I'm just back from Okinawa and San Francisco and think I have slept off the
jet lag. Okinawa is both different and familiar with both medieval castles
feminist shamanism  and jet fighter bases. I was born in San Francisco and
the geology and flora of the entire region are home but the city itself has
always been an impenetrable mystery of immense dimensions. Still, it soothes
me at the same time it indifferently mocks my estrangement.