How seriously can we take what Pynchon is writing outside of his novels?

[Mark Kohut]

I take it all 'seriously'. one reason: I think he has a clear
distinction in his 'aesthetic' between
'the magic of fiction, say, and the prosaic world we all live in.
Which world he tries to speak the truth in.
from the intro to 1984, Slow Learner--no, no irony and leg-pulling
going on it that intro, imho--and even
this on Stone Junction.

I think he liked the book and I like that paragraph as an indication
of 'where he was at' then. And, since
another aspect of his 'aesthetic' is to have written the novels he had
conceived of in the sixties, an insight
into a lifelong belief (if we can get it understood aright). On the
surface, I'd say 'magical realism' is one level of
meaning.



On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 6:07 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
>
> My favorite example is the following paragraph from the Stone Junction
> intro:
>
> "Stone Junction's allegiance, however, is to the other kind of magic, the
> real stuff---long practiced, all-out, contrary-to-fact, capital M Magic, not
> as adventitious spectacle, but as a pursued enterprise, in this very world
> we're stuck with, continuing to give readings---analog indications---of
> being abroad and at work, somewhere out in it." (p. XIII)
>
> Apart from the fact that Stone Junction is a shitty novel, this sounds a
> little too enthusiastic to me. Was Tom high when he wrote it? The words
> "all-out, contrary-to-fact, capital M Magic" stuck to my mind the very first
> I read them, though. And some of the more positive characters in Pynchon's
> work - think of Geli, or of Sortilège - seem to be pictured as if they
> actually have magical respectively psychic powers. Maybe Pynchon really
> believes in "capital M Magic." So I'm not sure about this, neither about the
> particular passage nor about the problem in general.
>
> How seriously can we take what Pynchon is writing outside of his novels?
> Discuss!
>
>
> "Magic is a means of re-opening metaphysical possibilities, re-enchanting
> the world, that counters the loss of possibilities lamented by Cherrycoke
> and documented throughout Mason & Dixon. Magic is thus a form of what
> Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow calls "counterforce," something that opposes
> the dominant cultural forces of decadence and entropy. It functions both as
> a metaliterary trope for the fictional processes that lead to recovered
> metaphysical potential and as a metaphor for the attempts of characters
> within the narrative to re-enchant their worlds. This re-enchantment is,
> however, partial and fragmentary in that it results in ambiguous pockets or
> islands of possibility within a larger context of politico-economic
> domination and manipulation. Magic in Mason & Dixon takes the form primarily
> of feng shui, kabbalism, and magical signs or sacred glyphs. It can be
> both(,) black magic, investing history with a sense of malevolent but
> otherworldly conspiracy, and white magic, granting aspects of America('s)
> tentative hope and lyric beauty." (Jeffrey Howard: The Anarchist Miracle and
> Magic in Mason & Dixon. Pynchon Notes 52/53, 2003, pp. 166-184, here 176.)
>
>
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