A sort of thesis

[Mark Kohut]

LOL, John....of course.

Here is the case simply: Against the Day contains a whole vision of
History, the world as we know it, with what it might have been as
well, since....maybe the Enlightenment.

Against the Day contains so much more of Pynchon's most mature
redemptive visions of life (as the Swedish Academy likes to put it I
think) as well as as much savage critique of it as GR has, for
example.

With the mathematics and science subsets, he actually ventures into a
near-metaphysical vision, a 'metaphysical' vision of our relation to
Life. Imaginary numbers are the major symbol.

Related to above: Against the Day is the most superb, the deepest
presentation of a "religious" vision that is poised between pantheism,
panentheism, a belief in a Godhead, a kind of Deism. That is: like the
ending of The Crying of Lot 49 we cannot know the "outcome", P's real
beliefs, in this fiction--which might surely mean such ambiguity IS
his real religious belief.

And this huge novel is more encoded, more densely packed with
meaningful allusions, imagistic resonances than GR or M &D
because it needs all the words it has to encompass its ambitions.

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 6:19 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Mark I know you love Against the Day but that's a big claim. More
> ambitious than Gravity's Rainbow? Great in a larger way?
>
> You gotta go first here.
>
> On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 10:13 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> There are a few "big" books that have the status
>> of great novels that all cluster in my head in the same
>> place.
>>
>> Moby Dick, Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, The Man Without
>> Qualities, The Tin Drum, The Golden Notebook, Gravity's
>> Rainbow, Portrait of a Lady, Middlemarch, Cairo Trilogy, Radetzky March
>> and like that.
>> Swap out or add others, we can do.
>>
>> Proust in seven volumes is in a class by itself because of length.
>> (Some say first three volumes equivalent to the above bracketing?)
>>
>> But I think the two most ambitious novels in English, perhaps, the only ones
>> I can think of this morning, that might be 'great' in even larger ways
>> than the above
>> are Finnegan's Wake and Against the Day.
>>
>> Argue with me. Find others?
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l