A sort of thesis

[Mark Kohut]

As I have recently suggested here, I see it differently this reading
and I loved my expectations being stopped short my first reading. But
maybe the later Pynchon who disses it sees that ending differently
from when he wrote it and does see a 'cheap trick'. One might say, we
await the answer to that crying reason.

To me, now, the whole novella builds to the theme of an unknown
answer, an unfurling of America openness when one simply accepts the
literalness of an auction with secret bidder we never learn of and
asks why--what thematic effects---P did this.

I have always like this humble appreciation of The Crying of Lot 49
from Harold Bloom, no overly humble guy: "Read it once straight-thru and
immediately read it again." He implied, I think, that that is what he
did on first reading it.

There is a structuredl open-endedness that contains the theme of not
excluding middles, I think, of an unfurling America of all the events
Oedipa experiences that opens her up to a new self. Oedipa awaits...is
the overt surface meaning of that ending.

I think one might say that Fitzgerald's "something commensurate to our
capacity to wonder" is embodied by Oedipa's wondering.....partly TRP's
'answer' to whether we 'beat on against the current borne back
ceaselessly into the past' or enter 'the fresh, green breast' of a new
world.

One way to read it but it is also willfully open to other ways. As if
TRP embodied "7 Types of Ambiguity" in his plot not just in many
words. (The "7 Types" a synecdoche from me re all the puzzling people
and things Oedipa goes thru)

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 10:40 AM, john bove <malignd at gmx.com> wrote:
> That is: like the ending of The Crying of Lot 49 we cannot know the
> "outcome" ...
>
> This is very overrated.  There is no dilemma at the end of COL49, no logical
> conundrum.  P simply ends to book without showing the ending.  One of the
> proferred possibilities is true, Oedipa simply doeesn't know which.  And P
> walks away without informing the reader.  A cheap trick.
>
> Sent: Saturday, January 16, 2016 at 6:47 AM
> From: "Mark Kohut" <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> To: "John Bailey" <sundayjb at gmail.com>
> Cc: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Subject: Re: A sort of thesis
> 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
> - Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l