Gnosticism in Gravity's Rainbow (Jeffrey Howard)

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Jeffrey Lamar Howard --- Heretical Reading: Freedom as Question and 
Process in Postmodern American Novel and Technological Pedagogy.

https://www.lib.utexas.edu/etd/d/2007/howardj93632/howardj93632.pdf

Which discusses Pynchon together with Nabokov and PKD.

I just read the first chapter - Gnosticism, Postmodern Fiction and 
Deconstructive Critique (pp. 19/26 - 62/69) - and liked it a lot! The 
severe mistakes of Dwight Eddins ("The Gnostic Pynchon"), very 
influential on this very list way back, are named and corrected here.

>
> "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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