Borges & Pynchon

[ish mailian]

Cool connection, sure, the Time & Space... Pynchon's spaces have much
of the Gothic and, of course, Infinity and Light.

This may be too Intro for you but for those not all that familiar with
Borges check this out as an Intro to the idea that the authors are
anxiously influenced

http://www.openculture.com/2019/07/an-animated-introduction-to-the-magical-fictions-of-jorge-luis-borges.html

Enjoy,
Ish

http://www.openculture.com/2019/07/an-animated-introduction-to-the-magical-fictions-of-jorge-luis-borges.html

On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 6:26 AM Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
>
> Rediscovered Borges. Do enjoy it. Now I'm thinking about him & our
> author: Yes, in Pynchon's early novels there's what Bloom calls "anxiety
> of influence". But is this also the case in the later ones? Well, a
> continuity of shared motifs is that buildings - but I'm not sure that
> Pynchon took that (exclusively) from Borges - still tend to appear
> smaller from the outside than they eventually turn out to be ...
>
> " ... We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was
> open plain and sky. To draw even more complex patterns on the blank
> sheet. We cannot abide that OPENNESS: it is terror to us. Look at
> Borges. Look at the suburbs of Buenos Aires The tyrant Rosas has been
> dead a century, but his cult flourishes. Beneath the city streets, the
> warrens of rooms and corridors, the fences and the networks of steel
> track, the Argentine heart, in its perversity and guilt, longs for a
> return to that first unscribbled serenity ... that anarchic oneness of
> pampas and sky...."
>
> Gravity's Rainbow, p. 264
>
> "Both Borges and Pynchon write fantasies, but while Borges's fantasies
> are built upon curiosities of language or mathematics, Pynchon's are
> extensions of man's capacity for evil and for love. Borges's language is
> one that is triumphantly capable of delight and astonishment, but
> Pynchon writes from the knowledge that language can also hurt and
> connect. GRAVITY'S RAINBOW cataclysmically alters the landscape of
> recent fiction, and it alters the landscape of our moral knowledge as
> well. "
>
> Edward Mendelson (1975): The Sacred, the Profane, and the Crying of Lot 49
>
> http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/TheSacredTheProfaneAndTheCryingOfLot49.pdf
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l