Discussion opener for GRGR(4) (church and hospital)

[Andrew Dinn]

Paul Murphy writes:

Oh boy, a post about `Gravity's Rainbow'. Novel!

> >11) "a Victorian paraphrase of what once, long ago, resulted in Gothic
> >    cathedrals [. . .] back to fright, to simple escape [. . .] the
> >    Hospital of St Veronica of the True Image for Colonic and
> >    Respiratory Diseases." (46.29) Oh boy, *V*eronica and that
> >    *V*ictorian paraphrase. Anyone want to attempt to take this
> >    paragraph apart?

> Reading this paragraph last night, I must've gone over the sentence "They
> are approaching..." to "chances for mercy that year" 5 or 6 times, just for
> the sheer pleasure of it.

Yeah, it's a real grabber ain't it.

> Immediately it made me think of Proust, partly
> due to the extraordinary, epic construction of the sentence, but largely
> due to its content. I don't remember exactly where it is (and it would
> probably take a full afternoon to wade through my notes), but at one point
> in _A la recherche..._, Proust constructs an elaborate metaphor for
> literature around the image of the Gothic cathedral, with its grandeur and
> its inaccessible recesses and crannies. Taking the Proustian motif as a
> point of departure, I read this sentence as a description firstly of a
> process of secularization in architecture (from the "fashioning of suitable
> confusions toward any apical God" to the hospital's "cruel network of
> sensuous moments that could not be transcended"), with all of the attendent
> questions concerning religion, society and power (how the doctors replace
> the priests as figures of unimpeachable authority, how science supplants
> faith, usw.).

The Proustian cathedral is indeed the point of departure. However,
this reading fits closer to the plan of Henry Adams `Mont Saint Michel
and Chartres' whose subject is exactly this architectural rise and
fall; the movement from early, simple mediaeval architecture through
high Gothic to the chaotic, populist (and at times bordering on pagan
or animist) bulk and decoration exhibited at Chartres; and the
processes of order and disorder which inform this up and down
movement. So, if there is any image which fits here it must be the
parabolic up and down trajectory of every failed attempt to touch the
heavens, to transcend the mundane (an up and down A, not a down and up
V).

`In my beginning is my end' - which new age guru used that phrase?
Well, it's true of the rocket since we all know that Brennschluss will
take over and the fall will occur. And it's the same with religious or
spiritual movements. The seeds of its own destruction lie in the very
form of its original organization. Then Victorian period (V period,
anyone?)  in Britain is the final working out of the disorder and
chaos which represents the crash of the Protestant movements from the
preceding 200 years.

> Secondly, might we not have here a clearly self-reflexive 'meta-fictional'
> statement about GR? The 'derangement of aim', the 'doubt as to the God's
> actual locus'? Recall that for Proust, the 'locus' of the novel was the
> self constructing the work of literature -- _A la recherche_ is structured
> (at one level) as an 'egology' of the narrator. GR refuses even this
> centering device (leaving the 'centrality' of Slothrop out of the
> discussion for now); the "intentions of the builders" towards a "zenith"
> are "bent" in the hospital's architecture, in the direction of the rubbish
> and refuse of the city -- smoke, excrement, warrens, drive belts, rats and
> flies; in short, in the direction of the preterite. At the very least, the
> grandiose Proustian claims made on behalf of art's ability to redeem or
> transcend are called into question here, but without necessarily
> countermanding these claims; at the conclusion, "chances for mercy that
> year" are mentioned...

I think these claims are fundamentally questioned. After all, none of
those little pigs actually got away now, did they (unless of course
you think Slothrop . . .) Seems to me that Pynchon does not recommend
any continuing struggle on the off chance that one day it might pay
off but rather because resistance pays off every now and then with a
moment of liberating independence (from self and others).


Andrew Dinn
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And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
To the rushing water speak:  I am.