Gnostic Myth-Making...?

Kai Frederik Lorentzen lorentzen at hotmail.de
Thu May 23 04:35:50 CDT 2013


On 23.05.2013 05:51, Lemuel Underwing wrote:

> So if Miss Hume is convincing in her argument that one of Pynchon's 
> main stabilizing functions is his Myth-Making (and I think she is), 
> and furthermore that it is a type of Gnostic Myth with a Twist, who 
> are other Gnostic Myth-Makers if there are any?

Philip K. Dick (/VALIS/, /The Divine Invasion/, /The Three Stigmata of 
Palmer Eldritch/), Nicholas Roeg (/The Man Who Fell to Earth/) and 
Hermann Hesse (/Demian/) come to my mind first. There are more.

An excellent essay on the issue is "The Modern Relevance of Gnosticism" 
by Richard Smith (pp. 532 - 549 in James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag 
Hammadi Library in English).

>
> The most apparent is the awesome John Crowley, whose work I have been 
> immersed in for the better part of 2013: /Little, Big/ , /The 
> Solitudes , and Love & Sleep /namely... tho' it seems he has read /The 
> Crying of Lot 49 /I mean /really /read it I don't think he goes much 
> beyond it...
> obsessing as I do after anything called Gnostic once who are the other 
> authors that may, however one attempts to stretch the term, be called 
> Gnostic in their ability to spin new Mythos of the sort Pynchon weaves?
>
> I haven't tried anything by Saramago...?

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