TCoL49 - relevance - from lithub.com

[Monte Davis]

As an extension or refinement of "excluded middle," read (or re-read)
Dwight Eddins' 'The Gnostic Pynchon,' and consider _metaxy_

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaxy [clumsily written but gets the essence]

Through earlier time with Campbell, I was fortunate enough to know Hans
Jonas on gnosticism (though not Voegelin, or Kabbalah-as-gnosticism) when
GR came out. So I was primed for Eddins' brilliant 1990 reading of Pynchon,
and especially his gnostic-vs-Orphic take on GR.

The Gnostic stance is that we are fallen sparks (= Kabbalah's "broken
vessels") of The Light, of prefect transcendence; that this world is some
cruel demiurge's deception to make us forget it; that only gnosis,
"knowing," will take us out of the corrupt rubble and back to the Holy
Center. That applies --and this is crucial -- whether the gnosis takes the
form of Enzian's magical/mystical system (with a touch of technology) *or*
Blicero's scientific/technological system (with a touch of magic) *or* a
redemptive religious system of Saved and preterite, in which the Rockets
and the white steeples aimed at heaven are the same .

The Orphic stance is that we *do* arise right here and belong right here.
Instead of rejecting the experienced world as deception, it embraces it,
listening for all its pre-verbal and non-verbal songs, finding that lost
harmonica again in the running stream. Knowledge isn't a learned way to
take yourself out, it's a rediscovered / remembered way to feel at home
again.

GR is one long metaxic ping-pong between those poles, a 760-page system of
words proving (like Rilke proves)  that no system of words will deliver the
Word we think we want.


On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 7:57 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> "Yet The Crying of Lot 49 occupies a strange third space:"
>
> This fine appreciator presents us another spin on this: the depth (or
> fullness) of the space of the excluded middle metaphor.
>
> The sublimity of the non-binary perspective: a third way.
>
> The way, just in itself, the book so wonderfully ends between binaries, so
> to speak.As an embodiment of this conceit.
>
> Becky sends:
> More at: (it’s quite interesting - read the last paragraph anyway - )
> http://lithub.com/oedipa-maas-our-guide-to-contemporary-paranoia/
>
>
> Also, Bloom reread it and wrote about it again sometime during the Bush
> years. He argued
> easily how it fit the times then, too.
>
> I think that P's way of finding perfect patterns within American history
> (and ongoing American life) in symbolic, mostly scenic form, is why.
>
> (and, very dicily, riskily, speculatively, probably wrong again on my
> part---why he didn't/doesn't like it since 1984.
> Too symbolically patterned, he thinks now)
>
> But this one is one where we "trust the tale not the teller".
>
> Reread it, I suggest. It will flower in your brain anew.
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 7, 2016 at 10:37 AM, Becky Lindroos <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
> wrote:
>
>> OEDIPA MAAS: OUR GUIDE TO
>> CONTEMPORARY PARANOIA
>> THE ONGOING RELEVANCE OF PYNCHON'S THE CRYING OF LOT 49, 50 YEARS LATER
>> July 7, 2016  By Nick Ripatrazone
>>
>> A global postal conspiracy. Post horns graffitied across southern
>> California. LSD prescribed as treatment for anxiety. Obscene radio station
>> hosts. Beatles cover bands. Widespread paranoia. The Crying of Lot 49,
>> Thomas Pynchon’s second novel, is quirky and eccentric even by Pynchon’s
>> standards. Now 50 years old, the slim novel is truly a snapshot of
>> mid-1960s culture.
>>
>> John Ruskin has said “all books are divisible into two classes: the books
>> of the hour and the books of all time.” Yet The Crying of Lot 49 occupies a
>> strange third space: novels that are timely yet timeless—books that are so
>> suffused with the cultural minutia and noise of a moment that their
>> saturation itself helps them to endure.
>>
>>
>>
>> Becky
>> https://beckylindroos.wordpress.com
>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>
>
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