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

[ish mailian]

The quote from Jeffrey Howard is nearly a poem, a dense and compressed
thesis on some of the most important ideas and on the truly amazing
literary accomplishments of Pynchon's M&D. To dismiss the Magic and/or the
Madness, in M&D, in Pynchon,  is easy enough. After all, we are Westerners,
we are Scientific and we are Enlightened, and so we are logical and
secular.

So go ahead, toss out the Christ baby, the primitive rituals of primitives,
the visions of the untrained and vulgar and superstitious, all mystery, and
all that Herbert Spencer's Agnosticism and Science and Philosophy can never
abide but must always denigrate, always denounce as the childish fancies of
the uninitiated, pre-scientific, primitive, barbarian races un-schooled by
his paternalistic and civilized betters of the European continent. But
don't toss out the bathwater. For water is, ask any scientist, magical and
miraculous.  And I think this is Monte's point and it is an excellent one.
Go ahead, look up water in Wiki and read, and if you are not
amazed....well, perhaps, as Scott Fitzgerald might argue, your capacity to
wonder, commensurate with the magic of Nature, has been lost with
paradise.  I think Spencer the wrong allusion is all, though the point on
poetry and science is key too.  To argue that, in his Luddite and Sloth
essays, for example, Pynchon is advocate for religious or magical living or
some such is another matter, but to dismiss magic is to lock up madness and
divinest sense. Like Chief Bromden or Faulkner's Idiot or Hamlet or Lear,
countless others, Emily D., Captain Zhang's rants, like Mason's, are the
stuff that dreams are made on, Queen Mab is in the Wind. Listen if you can
and here The Leaves of Grass, The Song of Thyself.


The Multiple Worlds of Pynchon's Mason & Dixon: Eighteenth-Century
Contexts, Postmodern Observations (Studies in American Literature and
Culture) by Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds (Editor)



The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo

 Tony Tanner


> Now, as for Magic... I'll leave that to the Thule Gesellschaft.
>
> Abrcadabra, abronacabrona,
> POOF!
>
>> "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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