A sort of thesis

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

On 16.01.2016 13:40, Mark Kohut wrote:

> 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.

Plus rivers.

 >The following chapter concerning Shem's mother, known as "Anna Livia 
Plurabelle", is interwoven with thousands of river names from all over 
the globe, and is widely considered the book's most celebrated passage 
(Wikipedia) <^


"Oceans of Gaul, I mosel hear that!" (p. 207)



> 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
>
>

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