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

[matthew cissell]

Taste classifies even as it classifies the classifier.

"Stone Junction is a shitty novel, this sounds a little too enthusiastic to
me. Was Tom high when he wrote it?" - That is an example.

So this lister thinks that Pynchon writes blurbs for novels that are
"shitty". Maybe Tom liked it? Mabe Pynchon likes books we don't?

UNless you have some reason to suspect someone of subterfuge or
insincerity, you should take it at face value. Does someone think his
letter in support of Ian McEwen was not sincere?

Pynchon's response to the Who's Who people was clearly "taking the piss",
but his comments in the INtro to SL are backed up by fact. (In this case I
will not get into the philosophical argument of what makes a fact, suffice
it to say there is a place called Long Island and Pynchon did grow up
there. Just like he did enter the Navy. IF that's open to debate then count
me out.)

So how seriously can we take what P writes in blurbs and essays and
reviews? Totally.

Now, as for Magic... I'll leave that to the Thule Gesellschaft.

Abrcadabra, abronacabrona,
POOF!


On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 12:07 PM, 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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