What do you think this book meant?

What do you think this book meant?

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treat the people around you with recognition, don't be a fake. stay grounded in reality.

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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)

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We can now see how Wyatt's artistic imagination bridges the gap between low and high, and how that in the mythic system of alchemy, the self is both in need of the redemption and the redeemer, unlike Christianity where the redemption is conducted by a divine agent. Wyatt is obsessed with the purity of his material. The esoteric gold of truth is hidden behind the base values of a contemporary society that embraces the exoteric science and religion. There is definitely a hierarchy of myth though, Wyatt's esoteric art surpasses both science and religion in the search for meaning.
Science fails for Gaddis because it attempts to dissect rather than integrate... I marked the quote "That's where the curse is, fragments don't belong to anything. Separately they don't mean anything, but it's almost impossible to bring them together into a whole". Science only contains self contained lumps of information, that are abstracted, reduced, and distorted experience.
Christianity also fails for Gaddis because its institutionalization has perverted it's humanistic tendencies. Rev. Gwyon even said that Mithraism failed because it lacked central authority. When theologians equated Christ with Logos, it replaced mysteries and Immanence with a rational and authoritative transcendence. Gaddis illustrates this by bringing up the church father Origen, who castrated himself so that he could pray without temptation... this becomes a celebration of transcendence without any regard for the physical. Science and Christianity both lack a synthetic transformation process that acknowledges the place of the physical and attempts to transform it, rather than to deny them significance or to destroy them, or turn them into abstract data points. Pivner is lobotomized because for the average person, attempting to enact the virtues of Christianity has been transformed into a mindless activity, sanctioned by the institutionalization of the church. Jung said that alchemy endeavors to fill in the gray area created by Christianity's tension of opposites. The novel happens around Christmas because for Gaddis, Christ's day has failed.

Gaddis does not illustrate a present in touch with the myths of the past, but how the present articulates the irrelevance and mendacity of the past's myths.
Wyatt because he attempts to transform his world without participating in it. Valentine states the Recktall Brown "does not understand reality... Recktall Brown is reality". Freudianly, Brown is the character that Wyatt needs to engage but never does. Wyatt refuses to deal with personal suffering until the very end of the novel, when he takes the name Stephen, which his mother intended for him. At the end of the novel, Wyatt realizes that change is constant, and the only material to be reliably transformed is the self. The content of cultural tradition grows so continuously that the individual becomes a palimpsest of many conceptions of meaning. For Gaddis, seeking redemption in a world so informed by those contradictions only adds to a reification of consciousness. This is shown in the structure of the novel in how there is no mythological unifying thesis that can be pulled from the endless allusions that have been used so much that they become like a worn coin with no identifiable ridges. The allusions to so many different ways of meaning suggests the inevitable futility of myth. The responsibility of redemption ultimately falls on the person that seeks it.
Wyatt ends up scraping down old paintings... this represents the necessity of the destruction of any art the fraudulently claims to give structure to the white canvas of reality.
All in all, every single part of the text (sentence structure, use of allusion, dialogue, grammar, characters) creates the theme that it is impossible to surrender yourself to one mythic system and to expect any true meaning, and that the only transformation is self transformation, and that everything else is misconstrued as the locus of virtue.

bump for this anons good writing

It's The post modern novel. You can think it means nothing or assign your own meaning but if you are going to really see it for what it is and recognize the truth you have to just be yourself man.

Great post.

Thanks for posting this user, I enjoyed the read.

the saneside outside sheltering the insane inside: to present the static sane side outside to another outside saneside, to be esteemed for that outsane side while all the while the insanside attacks your outsane side as though we weren't both playing the same game