Hi all,
I’m new to the forum. Been watching from the wings for a long time now, and decided I wanted to join the fun. I’m not sure that I’m posting this in the right place, but since my primary interest is Blood Meridian, I figured this couldn’t be *too* wrong.
Anyway, I’ve started reading Pynchon recently, and I’ve been a bit struck by some coincidences relating his work to McCarthy’s. I’ve only read The Crying of Lot 49, and I’m currently making my way through Gravity’s Rainbow, so I’m surely no expert on him. However, even with this minimal exposure, I’ve come across several interesting tidbits:
First, in my first attempt through Gravity’s Rainbow (I’ve had a few false starts), I saw, almost immediately, on page 11 of the blue Penguin edition, the character Pirate Prentice “gaz[ing] through sunlight’s buttresses”. So I thought, wow, McCarthy must have lifted that line (“buttresses of light”) in BM from this novel. Which I thought was weird, because Pynchon definitely didn’t strike me as something McCarthy (the McCarthy I’d made up in my brain) would read.
Then I quit GR, just hated it. A few months after, I was reading my copy of The Counselor in a nearby bar, and some guy sits down next to me, asks me what I’m reading… Long story short, he’s a moderate McCarthy fan and a huge Pynchon fan. I asked him what he liked so much about Pynchon and part of his response was that he considers Gravity’s Rainbow to be a very *gnostic* book. He said he couldn’t go into detail without spending ages talking about it, but that I should pick it back up and pay attention to all the religious references in it. Well, that was enough to intrigue me, so I went back to it, and I’m loving it now. And the religious stuff is there. Wow, I totally didn’t see it at first, but it’s there. Lines that match McCarthy for darkness where God is concerned. E.g., in one scene where he describes how Dutch settlers extinctified the dodoes on the island Mauritius in the 1600s (a thinly veiled metaphor for genocide), Pynchon writes
“To some, it made sense. They saw the stumbling birds ill-made to the point of Satanic intervention, so ugly as to embody argument against a Godly creation. Was Mauritius some first poison trickle through the sheltering dikes of Earth? Christians must stem it here, or perish in a second Flood, loosed this time not by God but by the Enemy. The act of ramming home the charges into their musketry became for these men a devotional act, one whose symbolism they understood.”
There really does seem to be a fair bit in common thematically, which I’m quite surprised by: theodicy, fate vs. free will, materalism vs. idealism, etc.
Then there’s a scene where some characters are holding a seance, and the medium, claiming to be in contact with the recently deceased husband of one of the attendees, reports the spirit as saying how he was now
“conscious of the wind, as his mortality had never allowed him. Discovered it so… so joyful, that the arrow must veer into it. The wind had been blowing all year long, year after year, but [the spirit] had felt only the secular wind… he means, only his personal wind.” (ellipses Pynchon’s)
Now, fart joke aside, he’s clearly using wind here as a metaphor for agency (whether divine or personal). And in the same paragraph, the medium reports the spirit as saying that everything had become “irrelevant dance”. (Honestly, I’m not sure what he means there. The passage is really opaque.) But the connection between divine vs. personal agency and linking it to dance pricked my ear up. And most importantly is that phrase “secular wind”, which McCarthy appropriated for The Road.
Then, in reading about Gravity’s Rainbow, I’ve learned that one of the big motifs in it is Kabbalah. Which wouldn’t resonate with me if it weren’t for the very recent post by Glass connecting the epilogue of Blood Meridian to the book on Kabbalah by Gershom Scholem, which, according to Weisenburger’s “Companion to Gravity’s Rainbow”, was one of Pynchon’s sources in writing GR. See the link:
https://www.cormacmccarthy.com/topic/blood-meridian-tidbits/
And finally, and most amusingly.. Apparently there was a tv show in the early 90s, called “The John Larroquette Show” the main character of which was a Pynchon fan, and there were many Pynchon references made on the show. And apparently the creators of the show contacted Pynchon, and he told them that if they wanted to refer to an unpublished work of his, to call it “Pandemonium of the Sun”. So weird! Here’s a link:
http://articles.latimes.com/1994-03-20/news/tv-36140_1_john-larroquette-show
What think ye? Any Pynchon fans out there?
