Gnosticism in Gravity's Rainbow (Jeffrey Howard)

[Keith Davis]

Looks very interesting. Keep us posted...

On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 10:14 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> 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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