Tarot in Bleeding Edge

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

"Even though its creators claim not to Do Metaphysical, that option in 
DeepArcher remains open, alongside more secular explanations ..." (p. 427)

/M & D/ has 78 chapters, the Tarot has 78 cards. In /GR/, more precisely 
in its last part, Pynchon first uses the Tarot for his artistic 
purposes. Very probably --- "Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about 
it than you'll ever find here."  (p. 588) --- inspired by /Mumbo Jumbo/. 
Pynchon takes up the theme explicitly again in /AtD/, where he draws a 
more conventional picture of the Tarot than in /GR/. And while in /GR/ 
the reference is clearly A.E. Waite, it has been argued here by Alice 
that /AtD/'s Nickolas Nookshaft is actually a portrait of A. Crowley. 
Sounds plausible enough to me. As far as I know, there is no academic 
study on Pynchon's use of Tarot. What interests me today is the Tarot's 
shadowy half-presence in /Bleeding Edge/.

The word "Tarot" - please correct me if I'm wrong! - appears in the 
novel only once. "'I designed it [DeepArcher]. Like that chick who did 
the tarot deck. Awesome and don't forget hip,' half, but only half, 
ironic" (p. 86). Why the Tarot mention here? Now, no matter whether 
Cassidy is referring to Pamela "Pixie" Colman Smith (who did the Waite 
Tarot) or to Lady Frieda Harris (who did the Crowley Tarot), the passage 
hints at the fact that women often contribute graphic design to 
projects. I don't think this is about feminist critique (à la 'women are 
only allowed to do the graphics but not the thing itself'), since 
Cassidy places herself in that tradition with pride.  Another meaning of 
the passage might be that Pynchon wants to draw a parallel between the 
outbreak of modern occultism and the emergence of the Internet and its 
culture.

In the first paragraph of chapter 39 we get an echo of that one and only 
mention: "Sometimes, down in the subway, a train Maxine's riding on will 
slowly be overtaken by a local or an express on the other track, and in 
the darkness of the tunnel, as the windows of the other train move 
slowly past, the lighted panels appear one by one, *like a series of 
fortune-telling cards* [emphasis added] being dealt and slid in front of 
her. The Scholar, The Unhoused, The Warrior Chief, The Haunted Woman ... 
After a while Maxine has come to understand that the faces framed in 
these panels are precisely those out of all the city millions she must 
in the hour be paying most attention to, in particular those whose eyes 
actually meet her own---they are the day's messengers from whatever the 
Beyond has for a Third World, where the days are assembled one by one 
under non-union conditions. Each messenger carrying the props required 
for their character, shopping bags, books, musical instruments, arrived 
here out of darkness, bound again into darkness, with only a minute to 
deliver the intelligence Maxine needs. At some point naturally she 
begins to wonder if she might not be performing the same role for some 
face looking back out another window at her" (p. 439). A truly beautiful 
passage based upon an experience every subway rider knows! Pynchon 
possibly avoids the word "Tarot"because, having grown respect over the 
years, he did not want to abuse the tradition the way he did in /GR/ 
where he invented "Der Grob[e] Säugling, 23rd card of the Zone's trumps 
major" (p. 707); in /AtD/ there is no overstretch of the Tarot form. The 
form remains untouched and thus can work as as analogy.

If this was all - and perhaps it is! - the Tarot reference in /Bleeding 
Edge/ would be a mere reminiscence to /GR/ and /AtD/. There is the 
riddle of DeepArcher, though, which might be relevant here too. Most 
reviewers perceived DeepArcher as "kinda 'Second Life'" (to quote a 
recent local review). Certainly not wrong, but when we look at the, 
well, symbolic load the motif carries all through the novel, this is 
perhaps not enough to understand what Pynchon wanted to say. Then there 
is, starting with Evgeny Morozov in his FAZ review from September 2013, 
what one could call the Foucault connection. About DeepArcher Morozov 
writes: "It’s a space of otherness and deviance – it’s what Michel 
Foucault once described as 'heterotopia.'“ A handful of reviewers 
followed that path, and we may discuss this - Foucault's short text /Of 
Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias/ can be read online in English 
for free -  another time in detail. But what about DeepArcher's 
spiritual aspects? Here it is interesting to note that 'Archer' is 
another word for 'Sagittarius' and vice versa. Now, I don't know much 
about Astrology, what I do know is that Sagittarius is, in the tradition 
Pynchon writes about in /GR/ and /AtD/, connected to the Tarot trump 
'Temperance' (Waite and others) bzw. 'Art' (Crowley). I don't know what 
to make with this, really, but when you look again at the opening quote 
of this mail - "Even though its creators claim not to Do Metaphysical, 
that option in DeepArcher remains open ..." it nevertheless might mean 
something.

Now meditate upon that for a while!

http://www.corax.com/tarot/cards/index.html?art
http://ensemble.va.com.au/Treister/HEXEN2/TAROT_COL/Sword6_Heidegger.html
http://www.corax.com/tarot/cards/index.html?star


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