A sort of thesis

[Mark Kohut]

Finnegans Wake, which I have only 'dipped into' and read about:

has a whole history of the world and philosophy of the world within it, I read.
incorporates as much symbolic life as it can in that incredible
linguistic variety
and languages.

Has a vision of Everyman and Night and Dreaming as the hugest metaphors
going.

And more I'm sure....

Size does matter when geniuses wield visions.

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 6:47 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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