The Crying of Lot 49. Group Read 2024

[Mark Kohut]

More relevance to some themes, I hope.

I spoke of reading a book that I thought had perspective,
very relevant stuff to show insight into Pynchon's novella...
to bring a certain slant of light onto P's genius. Which perspective
he had in 1965!   Since these books mentioned are all much later, yet
the prompting phrase and much intellectual ruminating goes way back
to discussions of modernity: "Round about 1910, human nature changed"---V.
Woolf

The book I was referring to was *The Ethics of Authenticity *by Charles
Taylor, google him, I'm gonna read more of him. The book is from 1991.

Here is his thrust (and I hope I do not kill his meaning with a
reductionist oversimplification.)

This: the modern world has lost its enchantment. (This, in a famous quote
from Weber, a Pynchon fave, we know).
That enchantment held all of us in a spiritual/religious chain of being, so
to speak. [See The Great Chain of Being book or concept]
Wherein we were all connected beyond our {puny) selves. That great chain
bound us in communities of all kinds. Basic earthbound
communities as well as others. In which we defined ourselves. ( PS, this
organic community concept is what I would argue is Morris's
fingering of Pynchon's Garden of Eden nostalgia, but in history not myth. P
shows and says so in *Against the Day, imo. *And it is in another P fave,
Henry Adams*)*

Losing that connection in modernity, we are thrown back on our
individualism. THAT is the problem Taylor tackles.
Such individualism, he sez is psychologically grounded in nothing beyond
itself, (as the word kinda implies. I have ordered his* Sources of the
Self)*)
Such individualism is self-grounded, kind of like Morris's loop analogously
and therefore is wholesale pervasive narcissism. --(He uses others here; he
says this is seen everywhere by some, such as Lasch in his book The Culture
of Narcissism. Which I read but while not fully "woke", so am looking at
again) The whole rootless culture echoes it--allusion to Echo Court
intended. This reflection tower is everywhere, is also a mirror.   Seeing
the men wanting Oedipa can be seeing full-blown narcissism in all of them.
(Oedipa not feeling any sexual relevance in her situation may be a way of
saying she ISN'T narcissistic anymore.)

All of the religious-like signs Oedipa sees that are signs that do not lead
to religion as known are like the disenchantment of the--her--world. (This,
from Weber, seems very likely to me as part of Pynchon's intent.)

Taylor works hard in the rest of his book to show how individualism can
overcome itself, he thinks.....(an authentic connection to the polity of
one's
country is one way---Taylor is Canadian and near the end he contrasts his
Canadian readers with "the country just south of us" )