Gnosticism in Gravity's Rainbow (Jeffrey Howard)

[Ian Livingston]

Think about Kierkegaard in Sickness Unto Death.

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 4:07 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.)
> >
> >
> >
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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