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

[ish mailian]

The first question about the seriousness of what Pynchon writes outside his
fictions is akin to the question that was bounced through here recently on
how authors market themselves and the question "What is an Author?(
Foucault's famous essay).

The second question is more interesting to me. Is P serious about some kind
of Magic, countercultural Magic? I think so. One of the reasons I like P.

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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