Tarot in Bleeding Edge

[Tyler Wilson]

Nice! Thanks, Kai, for bringing this possibility to our attention.

And talk about beautiful Pynchon sentences / passages, as someone recently "threaded" . . . 
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T



> On Feb 2, 2015, at 6:56 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> "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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