/lit/ - Literature

I would make more time for reading, but I must make time for video games and studying languages.

With all these allusions in the book, one is tempted to link them all together in a supermyth, like what T.S. Eliot called The Mythical Method, "the continuous parallel between contemporary and antiquity that enables people to give significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is the contemporary world." Gaddis absolutely does not do this... he does not juxtapose many myths to reveal an unconditioned ground of meaning or being, but he juxtaposes them in order to show how there is no warrant for belief in anything claiming to be an unconditioned ground of meaning or being, and recognitions involves seeing that these myths are counterfeit. Gaddis extends myth to mean science, institutional religion, art, because they all claim to contain this special understanding.

In the novel there are three conflicting mythic systems: Christianity, the alchemical (lots of references to alchemy) art of Wyatt, and technology/science. It seems that Gaddis raises alchemical art to be the victor over all these other mythic systems, but this is wrong. Jung says that in alchemy, the goal is not turning lead into gold but reconciling opposites. Alchemy is not about the exoteric purpose (profit, fame), but about the esoteric purpose of the transformation of sinful to spiritual. This can be likened to the spiritual transformation that occurs so often in many different mythic systems. This connection is made clear by Paracelsus, that named the catalyst that led a person to achieve heavenly unity or to unleash destructive powers as "archeus". For Paracelsus, the "archeus" was the active principle and vector of life, that was connected with the rational and the universal soul. I think the archeus can be likened to the imagination. (to be continued)

>>10887779
>see a James Joyce novel

>>10747625
>author introduces a character
>immediately picture another fictional character I know in my head, ignoring all of the description and getting confused between the 2