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

[John Bailey]

1) I think P has blurbed a few burblers. Maybe he liked them, maybe not.
2) I think he's serious about some kind of magic, but isn't sure if
it's serious, which is why I like it so.

On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 10:22 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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