Gnosticism in Gravity's Rainbow (Jeffrey Howard)

[Mark Kohut]

This reading of Lot 49 led me to see freedom as a theme there too.

>From the dissertation Kai sent:
These four forms of freedom are freedom as presence and transcendence,
as liberating knowledge, as a spirituality constituting
self-awareness, and as choice conceived navigationally rather than
hierarchically.

Think about Oedipa and 'revelation". Think about the knowledge she
seeks and whether it is liberating. (I say Yes, it is).
Self-awareness, you bet and the anarchist dance is a nice near-literal
embodiment of 'navigationally'...as Oedipa's hierarchical world is
overcome, no?

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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