Despite holiday socializing, and the onset of MoPrint, I’ve been reading a lot. I promised myself I’d catch up on movies, and I’ve watched some, especially a couple on or by Phillip Glass, but mostly books, and since I finished Shadow Ticket, mostly non fiction.
Sometimes books just naturally lead into one another. After reading Shadow Ticket, I picked up The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) for a long overdue re-read. I’d first read it in the early 80s, after finishing Gravity’s Rainbow(1973) and V (1960). These are Pynchon’s first three novels, and there was a long wait before Vineland– the inspiration for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another- came out in 1990.
COL49 naturally led me to a book of essays on the book I’d picked up for when I returned to it. It started a cycle of reading that led me well down the rabbit hole of science, metaphysics and general weirdness that Pynchon is known for. Maxwell’s Sorting Demon, a theoretical critter invented by physicist James Clerk Maxwell to explain thermodynamics, which later was adopted by proponents of Information Theory, is the theme here.
New Essays on the Crying of Lot 49, Edited by Patrick O’Donnell: The first thing I noticed about this 1991 collection of 6 essays by various scholars ( counting O’Donnell’s Intro) is that it is longer than the original 150 page novel. Lot 49, later repudiated by its author as a money grab while he was immersed in writing Rainbow, has nonetheless tended to inspire well over its weight in critical analysis by academics. This is possibly because of its success as an intro to Post Modernism in college survey classes, but it’s undeniable that the book is rich with detail and a fascinating ambiguity drives it. Is the main character, Oedipa, imagining a centuries old conspiracy, or has she really crossed into an American underground of invisible, preterite society, under the rainbow, so to speak?
The essays are all very intriguing, but one of the standouts for me is Debra Castillo’s “Borges and Pynchon: The Tenuous Symetries of Art”, probably the reason I bought the book. I’ve read many of Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘short fictions’, and always been struck by how obvious it was that Pynchon must have read him too (another author I’d be surprised that TP didn’t read: Sterne). John Barth had first claimed Borges as a Postmodernist godfather in his ” The Literature of Exhaustion” essay of 1967. Castillo points out the “congruity” of imagery in the two authors: Borges, labyrinths, mirrors, tigers. Pynchon, labyrinths, the mirror of media, technology. Characters are “tenuous” and contingent. Mathematics (set theory in Borges’ “Library of Babel” for example) and sciences ( thermodynamics in COL 49) are another commonality.
Castillo identifies three categories the characters must address in which to compare the two writers: Arbitrary Rules, Symmetry, and Tedium. She is, thankfully to this amateur reader, fairly direct in her prose, but of course the concepts explored are rarified. A single reading won’t unlock the complexities of Borges or Pynchon, but the subject is very intriguing, and I’m sure I’ll return to it.
The collection also includes an essay, “A Re-Cognition of Her Errand Into the Wilderness”, by Pierre Yves Petillon, also refreshingly lucid -though again, complex- that outlines literary influences on Pynchon, from Nabokov and the Beats, back to Henry James. Along with Pynchon’s own comments in the Introduction to Slow Learner, a nice long list of influences to follow up on, though neither actually mentions Sterne or Borges.
Selected Non-Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges: I dip regularly into my Collected Fictions but it now seemed wise to pick up its companion volume. At the same time, I got Rigor of Angels, by William Eddington from the library. The two books are complementary: The first collects Borges’ many short observations on literature and philosophy, and the second links the work of German Philosopher Immanuel Kant, another German, Werner Heisenberg, discoverer of the Uncertainty Principle in physics, and Borges. The premise is simple: these three thinkers were all writing about one thing, the difficulty of defining an objective reality. Naturally, the (Maxwell’s?) demon is in the details, and take it from one who slept through much of his Philosophy 101 class at 18, the details are not easily grasped, or explained.
A very simplistic summary- sorry, it’s all I’ve got for you- is that it’s impossible to measure reality, while one is in it. For example, Kant, in Critique of Pure Reason, explored the impossibility of defining an objective reality, because we measure it by observing it change through time ( according to Egginton, I haven’t read Kant). Heisenberg proposed another ‘bootstrap’ concept: the impossibility of measuring a sub atomic particle in space, and in time, simultaneously, thus explaining the shenanigans these little imps get up to, and why scientists cannot ‘sort’ them. And Borges, a favorite of mine who can be considered a precursor to Post Modern Literature ( Barth, Pynchon, Eco, etc) writes conceptual, metaphysical tales of people and places that test the bounds of infinity (!), and thus the imagination. His story “The Library of Babel”, for example, tells of a library that contains every book that can possibly be written with a 24 character (Spanish) alphabet, as well as the book that contains all of those books. There is another book that contains all of those, and that book is also in the infinite rooms of the library. This is pure set theory, a poetic way of absorbing the basics I ignored in my high school Algebra struggles. It also becomes clear when you read it, that the library in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is an homage to Borges.
While Eddington writes in a clear, readable, well-paced manner, the concepts, as you can see, are far from crystalline. In one chapter, it becomes necessary to his project to explain how Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity relates to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle ( Einstein, for one, did not agree that it did). I read every word, but you’ll have to wait for that explication. Perhaps it’s written in the blog of all blog posts.
The book is well worth reading, and I learned a lot. The bios of Kant, et al, are fascinating, especially Heisenberg, who of course worked in the Nazi atomic program, concluding however ingenuously, that nuclear fission could not be harnessed. The book opens with his hearing the news, as an allied prisoner, of Hiroshima.
But a major reason to read the book is Eddinton’s discussion of Borges’ stories and essays. Many of the stories I had read, but the essays were a revelation, especially Borges’ discussion of Xeno’s arrow, the paradox of Achilles’ failure to out run a tortoise, because in order to catch up he must first run half the distance, and so on into infinity. Both Borges’ and Eddinton’s explanations of this theoretical conundrum were illuminating and enjoyable.
Borges also writes on other subjects besides metaphysics and logic, and expecting simply to read those essays mentioned in Eddington, for background, I found I couldn’t put the book down. Most are 3-4 pages in length, so even when desperately in need of being pushed back into the shallow end, they are easy to digest.
Fall and Winter, to me, is all about immersive reading. Groundhog-like, I burrow into my chair and emerge when the light of spring shines on the infinite graphical talents of the region. I’m deep into MoPrint deadlines now ( my MoPrint post is here), and a breezy pop culture history of the origins of comic books, a Neal Stephenson historical trilogy and some graphic novels fit the reduced bandwidth just fine. I’ll return to Borges, and Pynchon soon enough, but I’ve got plenty of food for thought until then.
#postmodernistfiction #philosophy #Borges #readinglist #Therigorofangels #Thecryingoflot49
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