Gnosticism in Gravity's Rainbow (Jeffrey Howard)

[Keith Davis]

How about magic as simply a shift in perception? It doesn't explain how it happens, but it explains the resulting sense of wonder and awe. States come and go, as someone once told me. Is the magician's function not to perform magic, but to induce the magical awareness, the altered state.

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> On Jan 18, 2016, at 2:18 PM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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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